emacs ediff mode treated badly
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ratpoison (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Ratpoison is probably working as designed here, but the design should probably change. When running ediff-buffers in emacs, a tiny control window is spawn. This control window needs focus to accept commands while the two buffers under comparison each get half of a split window. So one window is for keyboard input, and the other window is for viewing.
In ratpoison, that tiny control window is expanded to consume the whole frame thus hiding the comparison window. While it may be possible for users to create a small tile for the control frame and get the comparison window in an adjacent frame, it would be extremely tedious to do that every time someone needs to diff two files. Perhaps a workaround within emacs would be to embed the control window as a 3rd split, but then it takes up more screen estate and still imposes undue effort on the user.
Ratpoison needs a mechanism to handle that situation more elegantly. One idea: make the control window a transparent overlay of the comparison window. I'm not sure if that requires ratpoison to detect and give special treatment to emacs, but in any case the status quo isn't good.
