Subject: bug#21649: 25.0.50; [PATCH] Allow M-x man to reuse an existing window

From: martin rudalics <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 17:34:24 +0200

> Thanks for the hint. That's a very long thread however. I read the first
 > few messages but gave up for now for the following reason : I'd like to
 > address my bug report first, and it isn't about how difficult
 > display-buffer-alist is, even though I did mention that.

That thread explains why ‘display-buffer’ works as it does now.  It's
not useful to explain how ‘display-buffer’ works now.  So you did good
to give up soon ;-)

 > My concern is about making a *Man ...* window reusable. It can be done:
 > - by adding a new choice to Man-notify-method (which is what my patch does)
 > - by asking the user to customize display-buffer-alist, but in this case
 >    I think someone has to write a new function (similar to
 >    display-buffer-reuse-window except that it's not the same buffer, but
 >    another *Man ...* buffer -- e.g.
 >    display-buffer-reuse-window-with-matching-major-mode).
 > - maybe some other way
 >
 > If the question is of interest, which answer is the best ? If it's the
 > second, I could write such a function. Then we also somehow need to
 > advertise display-buffer-alist in the docstring of Man-notify-method.

Sorry, I must have missed your patch.  Probably I got confused by the
current state of emacs-devel.  Also I hardly ever use ‘man’ so I'm not
very competent to comment such an addition anyway.

How about writing an action function, say ‘man-display-buffer-my-way’, and
adding a clause like

       (`my-way
        (and (frame-live-p saved-frame)
             (select-frame saved-frame))
        (display-buffer man-buffer
        '((man-display-buffer-my-way ...)
        . nil)))

to ‘Man-notify-when-ready’?  This would hardly harm, satisfy anyone
asking for customization and likely introduce the first instance of an
action function outside of window.el.

And please don't drop [email-masked] from the list of recipients!

martin