[Proposal] Switching from popwin to window-purpose

[tuhdo]

As I already the advantages of window-purpose in this PR: #1072, it gives you precise control on where a buffer should appear. popwin will be a burden when more layers are added, when you have packages that create windows i.e. Geiser (interactive development for Scheme similar to SLIME) or SLIME (interactive development for Common Lisp). Currently popwin messes with SLIME buffers such as debugger and inspector windows badly, *vc -diff* is unusable when poping from below...

guide-key won't be affected because it has its own temporary window mechanism.

[syl20bnr]

I see what interesting UI we can achieve with this, I'll have a look at it.

[bmag]

As the author of window-purpose and a relatively new Spacemacs user, I'd be glad to help.
I was planning to write an extension for window-purpose that emulates popwin sometime in the next month, but I can try and do it sooner if you want.

[jordwalke]

I would be curious if window-purpose could solve the problem that I described here: #4247

[bmag]

If I understand the problem correctly, I don't think there will be a difference. I tried both popwin and window-purpose and didn't see a difference.

[jordwalke]

Could you fix this in window-purpose? Vim and emacs are terrible at this and it would be great if someone finally fixed it.

[bmag]

I doubt I can fix it, I think it's an Emacs thing. When creating a new window (e.g. for Helm), Emacs needs to split an existing window. But what if the point ("point" means the cursor's position in the window's buffer) is hidden from view? Then Emacs scrolls the window so the point is visible again. You can set the variable window-split-keep-point to nil, but that will change the behavior only for the split-window-below function and other functions that rely on it. For other scenarios, I don't of a simple way to prevent Emacs from scrolling the window.

You can read about window-split-keep-point and related stuff here, or via C-h v window-split-keep-point RET.

[jordwalke]

Continuing discussion there.

[StreakyCobra]

PR Pending: #1958

[syl20bnr]

Should be fixed in develop, #1958 has been merged.