Comments on: Customizing the size of the tex-shell window

Question: Customizing the size of the tex-shell window

gleuschk — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:31:16 -0800

I want to make a very small but critical change in the way emacs behaves in latex-mode. Can I force the tex-shell window to be a different size than half the current window?

When I'm editing a *.tex file, I hit C-c C-f to typeset it. The first result of this is that the window splits vertically into two equal windows, of which the top is the *.tex file and the bottom is the tex-shell buffer. Then various typesetting stuff happens (which I don't care about at the moment). What I'd like is for the new tex-shell window to be only about 5 lines tall, rather than taking up half of the current window. I found the emacs manual section about splitting windows, which indicates that 'split-window' accepts optional arguments for the size of the new window, but I can't figure out how to change the way 'C-c C-f' calls the split-window command.

By: Zed_Lopez

Zed_Lopez — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:14:26 -0800

C-c C-f is bound to the function tex-file in tex-mode.el (which includes latex-mode). tex-file doesn't call split-window, at least not directly.

I don't see any built-in hooks that would make this easy.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to write an elisp function that calls tex-file and then resizes the buffers, then bind C-c C-f in latex-mode to this new function. If you're not already an elisp hacker, that's probably not a very attractive value for easiest, but there you are.

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:29:54 -0800

Well, you can enarge/shrink a window vertically with the 'enlarge-window' command, and you can set a tex-mode hook, so maybe something like:

(setq tex-mode-hook
   '(lambda ()
      (enlarge-window -8)
      ))

(where -8 is the adjustment to be made to the height; I don't know which window this will apply to, so maybe you'd have to enlarge one instead of shrinking the other.)

By: beniamino

beniamino — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:44:45 -0800

You want sticky-repl.el

Download this file:

http://twb.ath.cx/~twb/canon/sticky-repl/sticky-repl.el

and put it somewhere like ~/.emacs_addons/sticky-repl.el

Then add the following to ~/.emacs:



(load "~/.emacs_addons/sticky-repl.el")

(setq special-display-function 'sticky-repl-display)

(setq compilation-window-height 5)

(setq same-window-buffer-names nil)

(setq special-display-buffer-names

         '("*Apropos*"

           "*Backtrace*"

           "*Calculator*"

           "*Compile-log*"

           "*Help*"

           "*Messages*"

           "*Occur*"

           "*Shell Command Output*"

           "*compilation*"

           "*grep*"

           "*ielm*"

           "*inferior-lisp*"

           "*scheme*"

           "*vc*"

           "*vc-diff*"

	   "*tex-shell*"))

(setq special-display-regexps

         '("\\*shell\\(< [0-9]+>\\)?\\*"

           "\\*slime-repl .*\\*"

           "\\*sldb .*\\*"))

Now, every time a buffer called "*tex-shell*" (or any of those other names) is opened, it will be given special characteristics. You can set the buffer height to something else than 5 by changing compilation-window-height.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:06:37 -0800

That works perfectly, beniamino, thanks.

By: RustyBrooks

RustyBrooks — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:46:54 -0800

That is awesome. I hate my perforce windows taking over half the display.

By: Aidan Kehoe

Aidan Kehoe — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:08:05 -0800

Rhomboid, it doesn't actually matter for that example, but lambda expressions are self-quoting--so this is equivalent to what you wrote:

(setq tex-mode-hook 
      (lambda ()
        (enlarge-window -8)
        ))

with the ocasionally important difference that it will be byte-compiled, while the version quoted with ' won't be. If you still want to explicitly quote the lambda expression, use

#'(lambda ...)

which allows byte-compilation.