Subject: bug#64619: [PATCH] Add toggle-window-dedicated command

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2023 21:47:39 +0000 (UTC)

Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]> writes:
> I agree with Drew here: strong dedication would be a better default.
> The fact that the window was weakly dedicated and that I could switch
> to another buffer without any warning or confirmation surprised me
> when I tried your patch, hence my reaction.  Dedicating a window to a
> buffer is somewhat like making a buffer read-only, and I guess "weak
> read-onlyness" would be surprising to most users.

Maybe it's surprising to Emacs developers, but I think strong dedication
would be more surprising to users.

In fact, I initially used strong dedication in my patch.  But I found it
annoying that I had to turn off strong dedication explicitly if I wanted
to switch to another buffer.  That's what made me realize that weak
dedication was better.

Strong dedication would make sense if C-x b used display-buffer.  Then
it would be very helpful: C-x b in a strongly dedicated window would
automatically use another window, which would be nice for muscle memory
since you could just use C-x b regardless of what window you're in.  But
C-x b doesn't use display buffer, and instead just errors when the
current window is strongly dedicated, which I think is fairly useless
behavior; the user reaction is almost always going to be annoyance
followed by C-x w d and C-x b again. So I think weak dedication is
better.  (Or making C-x b use display-buffer?)

>>> 2. I would not bind it to the "d" key but to the "!" key: ISTM that
>>> toggling window dedication is not such a common action that it
>>> needs a letter key binding.
>>
>> It's not common at the moment, but I expect some users will use this
>> command quite frequently.  Also the C-x w prefix is pretty empty at
>> the moment, so it's not as if it's competing with anything.
>>
>
> It's pretty empty, but IMO that's not a reason to use its "best"
> bindings for something like this.  "d" should IMO be used for "delete"
> (yes, I know it's already available with C-x 0).  See
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-09/msg00326.html.

Eh, I agree with others in that thread, I don't think C-x w d should run
delete-buffer. :)

But this does make me think that maybe toggle-window-dedicated should
not have a default binding at first.  We can see if people use it and
only then give it a binding.  I'm fine with that.