Subject: bug#17831: 24.4.50; bad default value for `Man-width'

From: martin rudalics <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 09:13:54 +0200

> As a general solution for such cases it seems the proper order is
 > to display an empty buffer first, and then fill it with the contents.

Obviously there are two way to tackle this:

Fill the buffer in some way and try to display it in a window with
suitable size.  That's what we've done so far and it fails typically
because it looks at the width of the selected window in order to do the
filling but displays the buffer in a window with different width.  The
first to report this problem was Lennart when filing bug#6000 more than
four years ago.

To fix this we could either use some sort of maximimum width (for me
more than 80 columns are not very readable anyway) and propose an
adequate display buffer action or implement simple heuristics to detect
how large the window used by `display-buffer' would be and fill the
buffer in some adequate manner.

Alternatively, we could display the buffer first, look at what size we
get, fill the buffer, and possibly resize the window afterwards.  For
`with-temp-buffer-window' this means that we would have to fill the
buffer either via `temp-buffer-window-show-hook' or in QUIT-FUNCTION.

martin