15 Sep 08 Dedicated window-buffer mapping with Emacs

I use CScope to navigate source code from within Emacs. It’s very, very useful and integrates will into Emacs. However, I’ve been wanting a way to control how cscope updates the buffer/window mappings as it locates search results for you. Sometimes, I like that CScope updates the buffer where I initiated the search to reflect the results, and it’s easy to get back to the point of origin using the C-c s u command.

However, sometimes I want CScope to leave my origin buffer alone and show the result location in another window so I can see both at the same time. It’s bothersome to have to arrange the buffers manually after performing a search, so I asked on stackoverflow.com, and voila! I got a good answer – create a simple keybinding to a function for dedicating a window/buffer mapping:

;; keybindings
(global-set-key [pause] 'toggle-window-dedicated)
 
;; buffer dedication (mostly for cscope
(defun toggle-window-dedicated ()
  "Toggle whether the current active window is dedicated"
  (interactive)
  (message
   (if (let (window (get-buffer-window (current-buffer)))
	 (set-window-dedicated-p window
				 (not (window-dedicated-p window))))
     "Window '%s' is dedicated"
     "Window '%s' is normal")
   (current-buffer)))

Now, using this, I can just hit the pause button on my keyboard when I want to pin down my main source buffer.

Tags: Emacs, programming, tools