Emacs: Preventing gud & pdb from controlling windows

Question

I\'m using pdb to debug Python programs and am unhappy with it\'s behaviour.

I have the screen divided into multiple emacs windows, and when I execute pdb, it (ran

Answer 1

You should use Sticky Windows to make your windows and buffers stick where they are but Sticky Windows won't stop gud/pdb from trying to steal your windows. When gud/pdb can't steal your source code window, it opens a new Emacs Frame even if there is another window on the current frame.

This comes from the fact that the function that tries to jump to the gud-pdb buffer (py-pdbtrack-track-stack-file) calls function pop-to-buffer with argument OTHER-WINDOW set to t.

To circumvent this behavior for all libraries that calls pop-to-buffer, you could cancel the role of OTHER-WINDOW by defining an advice on pop-to-buffer (in your .emacs) :

(defadvice pop-to-buffer (before cancel-other-window first)
  (ad-set-arg 1 nil))

(ad-activate 'pop-to-buffer)

You should also customize variable pop-up-windows to nil in order to force display-buffer (the low-level routine used to display a particular buffer on windows and frames) to not create a new window.