Erik Naggum wrote:
> 
> * Larry Troxler
> | This must be an age-old problem, yet I don't remember seing any answers
> | on this list.  Does this mean that nobody uses emacs anymore, or has this
> | finally been solved in the ACL/emacs interface code?
> 
>   this is how Emacs buffer display works in general.  even if you have set
>   the scrolling variables, if you get too much new text to display in one
>   operation so that Emacs cannot bring point back into the displayed region
>   of the buffer, Emacs will recenter the display, instead. 
...
> I'm surprised
>   that you haven't noticed this behavior elsewhere in Emacs.  it is indeed
>   age-old, probably 20 years.
> 

Well, only because (I think) that I'm a very casual user of emacs, and
only use it to edit files and run ACL. Once in a while, I'll run shell
mode, where I think the same problem shows up.
  
>   various measures may be taken to change this behavior somewhat, such as
>   tweaking the values of SCROLL-STEP and SCROLL-CONSERVATIVELY.  oh, you
>   run XEmacs.  I have no idea what these things are called in XEmacs, but
>   I'm pretty sure they're there, perhaps with a cloaking device.
> 
>   if you aren't satisfied with this, you can always try to tweak various
>   hooks that insert process output into the buffer, but it is easier to
>   learn to live this behavior.  again, I'm surprised that you haven't.
> 

Are you surprised I haven't learned the tweaks, or surprised I haven't
learned to live with the behavior? If the latter, then I'm surprised
that anyone would settle for this! Or perhaps I am not describing the
problem correctly? Ok, as an example, I'm in a ACL session, and type a
command at the lisp prompt that generates, say, 50 lines of output. The
frame (or is it Window?) that it's running in, say, allows 40 lines.
What happens is that typically, the view gets recentered so that the ACL
prompt (at the end of the output) is not shown on the bottom line of the
frame,  but rather somewhere towards the center. So, out of those 50
lines of output, I only see less than 20, and the bottom  20 lines are
empty space!

I would think that the ACL/emacs Elisp code, could recognize when the
ACL prompt is received (or by some other method, determine when the
output from Lisp has ended), and at that time adjust the output to put
the prompt at the bottom of the screen.

I think I vaguely remember some technical reason why this can't be done,
but now, I sure don't remember it.

 | If the former, is there a better Lisp-aware editor that can run ACL
as a
> | supprocess?
> 
>   apart from a choice between Emacs and XEmacs, no, there isn't.
> 

Of course there isn't - that was just my frustration showing itself,
sorry :-)

Larry