How to force Emacs not to display buffer in a specific window?

Question

My windows configuration looks like this:

          +----------+-----------+
      |          |           |
      |          |           |
      |          |         


        

Answer 1

Well, someone already asked the same question for completion. And I wrote up an answer that seemed to work pretty well.

It looks like you could use that same solution, except instead of adding to special-display-buffer-names, you can use the variable special-display-regexps. So something along the lines of:

(add-to-list 'special-display-regexps '(".*" my-display-buffers))

(defun my-display-buffers (buf)
  "put all buffers in a window other than the one in the bottom right"
  (let ((windows (delete (window-at (- (frame-width) 2) (- (frame-height) 4))
                         (delete (minibuffer-window) (window-list))))
    (if (<= 2 (length windows))
        (progn 
          (select-window (cadr windows))
          (split-window-vertically)))
    (let ((pop-up-windows t))
      (set-window-buffer (car windows) buf)
      (car windows)))))

Obviously you'll have to modify the regexp to not match the *Help* and other buffers that you actually want in the lower right window.

Regarding advising display-buffer, that would work. You can advise functions written in c, advice works in pretty much every case you'd want except when functions are called from c, or advising macros (which doesn't work b/c the macros are generally already expanded everywhere they're used).

Answer 2

I was thinking of advising display-buffer, but it's a function in c.

"display-buffer is an interactive Lisp function in `window.el'."

Also, you can advise C functions anyway.

Answer 3

Perhaps something like this could work:

(defun display-buffer-avoiding-lr-corner (buffer &optional not-this-window)
  (save-selected-window
    (when (buffer-file-name buffer)
      (select-window (window-at (- (frame-width) 1)
                                (- (frame-height) 2))))
    (let ((display-buffer-function nil))
      (display-buffer buffer not-this-window))))

(setq display-buffer-function 'display-buffer-avoiding-lr-corner)

Answer 4

Maybe it will make sense for you to make this lower right window dedicated by set-window-dedicated-p. Then this window will be ignored in operations like find-file-other-window as you want.