Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: beframe version 1.2.0

beframe enables a frame-oriented Emacs workflow where each frame has access only to the list of buffers visited therein. In the interest of brevity, we call buffers that belong to frames “beframed”.

Below are the release notes

Version 1.2.0 on 2024-10-23

Beframe is in a stable state. This version includes three new commands as well as quality-of-life improvements.

Assume or unassume buffers using a regular expression

There two more commands to assume/unassume buffers from/to the current frame:

  • beframe-assume-buffers-matching-regexp
  • beframe-unassume-buffers-matching-regexp

They both work by matching a regular expression against the global list of buffer names. When called with a prefix argument, the regular expression is matched against the buffer name or the name of the buffer’s major mode.

This is a convenient way to, for example, collect all email or IRC buffers in a single frame and work with them as you will.

Delete buffers matching a regular expression

Following the same principle as above, we have the command beframe-kill-buffers-matching-regexp. The regular expression is matched against the buffer name or the name of the major mode when called with a prefix argument.

Since this is a destructive operation, the command prompts for confirmation to operate on the buffers it has found. Users who do not like this check can set the new user option beframe-kill-buffers-no-confirm to a non-nil value.

Note that Emacs may still prompt for further confirmation if the given buffer is unsaved, has a running process, and the like. Also note that this operation applies to all frames because buffers are shared by the Emacs session even though Beframe only exposes those that pertain to a particular frame (when beframe-mode is enabled).

Commands that assume/unassume buffers report on their status

All relevant commands will now log a message about what they did. If, for example, beframe-assume-buffers-matching-regexp assumes two new buffers into the current frame, the message will be something like:

Assumed into current frame 2 buffers: (name-of-buffer-one name-of-buffer-two)

Similarly:

Unassumed from current frame 2 buffers: (name-of-buffer-one name-of-buffer-two)

If the command does not change the frame’s buffer list, it will report as much:

Did not modify the frame's buffer list

Several internal refinements

  • The way we derive the “global buffers” (buffers that are available in all frames, per the user option beframe-global-buffers) is more efficient. Thanks to Bruno Boal for the contribution in pull request 7: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe/pull/7. Bruno has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

  • We now have a single function to get a list of buffers, given certain parameters. Part of this work is by Bruno Boal, from the aforementioned pull request. The rest is from me, which includes the addition of the functionality about matching buffers with a regular expression (as seen in the new commands described herein).

  • Inferring the name of a project among those known to project.el no longer fails when the path is abbreviated (like ~/path/to/repo). Thanks to Fritz Grabo for the contribution and for Bruno Boal for double-checking it. This was done in pull request 6: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe/pull/6. The change is small, meaning that Fritz does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

  • The subroutines to assume/unassume buffers are consolidated into one function. It not only provides a single point of entry, but also takes care to carry out its operation only when it will yield a change to the current frame’s buffer list.

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