RE: Can't see help window until I select it
-----Original Message-----
From: xemacs-beta-bounces(a)xemacs.org [mailto:xemacs-beta-
bounces(a)xemacs.org] On Behalf Of Stephen J. Turnbull
Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 6:36 AM
To: David Karr
Cc: xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org
Subject: Can't see help window until I select it
David Karr writes:
> I installed the latest release of Cygwin and XEmacs on a new box a
couple of
> days ago.
Latest release of XEmacs? Does that mean 21.4.22 or 21.5.29?
Emacs-version: "21.4 (patch 22) \"Instant Classic\" XEmacs Lucid"
Is the new box running Vista, by any chance? I don't think any
of our
code has been seriously tested on Vista. And I'm sure essentially no
testing has been done on "Windows 7".
XP.
> When I do something that should show a "help" window,
like
> "describe-function", the only indication I have that help has been
presented
> is "Type q to remove help window, space to scroll the help" appearing
in the
> status area. The help window does not appear.
>
> If I then do "switch-to-buffer", I see that the help window that I
requested
> is at the top of the list, so I press Enter, and now I have my help
window.
There are a number of possibilities. First, XEmacs may think that the
help window is already displayed (eg, in a frame which is obscured by
other GUI windows). Presumably you would be aware of that, but please
confirm.
I only have a single frame right now, so that's not it.
Second, the same thing may be true, except that it's in one of
those
weird hidden DOS box terminals that Windows seems to need to get full
functionality from XEmacs. That you probably wouldn't know about.
I do get a useless DOS window when I run XEmacs, but nothing appears to
happen with it.
To help debug these, try doing C-h f get-buffer-window-list RET,
then
if it doesn't show, evaluate
(get-buffer-window-list
(get-buffer "*Help: function `get-buffer-window-list'*") 0 t)
If it does show, we'll need to try something else.
I did C-h f get-..., it didn't show, then I did meta-x eval-expression and
entered that expression, which returned nil.
Third, the values of `help-selects-help-window',
`pop-up-windows', and
`pop-up-frames' may affect this behavior. Could you try setting them
to different values and see if semi-sane behavior is restored?
Currently:
help-selects-help-window: t
pop-up-windows: t
pop-up-frames: nil
I tried toggling the values of all three of these. The only one that
produced any halfway useful results was setting "pop-up-frames" to t. This
at least made the help window immediately visible, in a new frame, which I
now had to manually "C-x 5 0" to get rid of, even after "q" to drop
the help
info. This change might be ok, if I could get "q" to dismiss the frame
also. It would probably be best just to get the old expected behavior of
seeing the help in a window in the existing frame, however.
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