Re: Suggesting `frame-split-biggest-window' Re: customize location and shape of a new window in a frame

[N. Jackson]

At 08:01 -0400 on Friday 2018-09-14, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>
>> The purpose of 'display-buffer-alist' is to set up a window for
>> one single buffer. It already fails miserably to make sure that
>> two buffers get displayed simultaneously as the thread of
>> Bug#32607 shows.
>
> Exactly. So for the purpose of "orderly setting up and saving
> compositions of windows", it's of no use, but in the specific case
> of BBDB (which just needs to (temporarily) pop up a single
> buffer), it should be sufficient.

The BBDB window isn't as ephemeral as a completions window is (for
example) which just needs to pop up temporarily. Here I have the
BBDB window displayed at all times when I'm reading mail and news --
it displays the records for the sender and/or recipients of the
message.

Perhaps `display-buffer-alist' is sufficient for the BBDB case. As
its documentation is a little unclear (while recursive code is okay,
recursive documentation is a little bit trying), it would be nice to
see an example of how this might be done.

It seems to me that it requires the developer or the user to write
code (to iterate through all the windows in the frame) that will be
almost identical to the code that the OP of this thread suggested
should not need to be reinvented by every developer/user wanting to
do essentially the same thing; rather the functionality should be
provided by the Emacs infrastructure.