Can I make emacs grep windows just use the other window to open files in?

I've got emacs in front of me.

I've run a find-grep, and it's got many hits, which are displayed in a window. The file names are displayed in green as hyperlinks.

I make that the only window, with C-x 1.

If I click on a file name, the window splits vertically, and the file with the found text is displayed in the other window.

If I click on further filenames, then the new file replaces the old file, which is what I want to happen.

So far, so good...

However if I resize the windows, then emacs will periodically (when I click) split one of the two windows again, rendering the display difficult to read. It will then cycle opening new files between the two new windows. Occasionally it will open more windows and make the situation worse. If I close any of these new windows they just get reopened again.

In fact sometimes this perverse behaviour happens even if I don't resize anything. It just seems to happen more often if I do.

I would like emacs to stop buggering around and just have one find-grep window and one 'display' window, and always replace the display window with the new file. I would also like to be able to set these windows to the sizes that seem most convenient.

Is there any way to achieve this?

Or can anyone point me to an essay on how the whole (replace the contents of this window/replace the contents of a different window/create another window by splitting) thing works, so I can go and hack it sane.

Solution

Short fix: Try doing this

(setq split-height-threshold nil
      split-width-threshold nil)

This will prevent Emacs from splitting windows automatically (horizontally or vertically). This might be undesirable in other situations, but this should do the job. Try it for a week or so and see if it disrupts your flow.

Also, I found that if the point was in one of the windows, and I clicked on a link, the file opened up in the next window (if any).

So, if you want to make the file open in the right window (when you have more than one window), you can ensure that the point is in the window before the window you want.

Longer answer:

OK. I was able to reproduce the problem. The thing is the window showing the files is pretty big (wide or tall) because you resized it and Emacs sees that the width or height is greater than the respective threshold and splits it likewise. So, we have to either make the threshold higher or disallow the behaviour completely.

And, just to answer the last few questions:

To get current window - (selected-window)
To get next window - (next-window)
To select a window - (select-window foo-window)
To get the buffer of the current window - (current-buffer)
To get the buffer of some window - (window-buffer foo-window)
To set a buffer for a window - (set-window-buffer foo-window bar-buffer)

I'm sure you can hack together decent window/buffer management functions using these functions.

You can use C-h f to get more details on each of these functions. Also check out the Elisp manual - http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/elisp/elisp_26.html