Make an Emacs Buffer Open the Way You Want

27 Dec 2022

Are you tired of having a particular buffer pop open in the wrong direction? Do you wish, for example, that the Racket REPL buffer showed up on the right in a vertical split, rather than below in a horizontal one? Look no further. I give you, display-buffer-alist:

(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
             '("\\*Racket REPL </>\\*"
               (display-buffer-in-direction)
               (direction . right)))

That little snippet will make sure when you hit C-c C-k inside of a racket-mode buffer, a REPL will pop up on the right-side instead of on the bottom. I find that much more comfortable to use.

The variable display-buffer-alist is a fantastically useful variable. There’s so much to it that I can’t write it up in a blog post. Fortunately, the indomitable Mickey Petersen has written up a fantastic article about how Emacs manages windows which you should definitely check out. Here are just some of the settings that I use:

Configuration for dedicated Eshell buffers #

If you don’t use Eshell already, it’s definitely worth a look. You might justly wonder, “why should I use something that’s inferior to $TERMINAL_EMULATOR_OF_CHOICE?” Good question. I still make heavy use of my terminal, but I really like how I can use completion frameworks like Vertico or Corfu with Orderless to search through history. If you’ve put a bunch of effort into configuring Emacs in those ways, it’s really nice to port that across.

I also used Eshell to great effect when I was debugging my implementation of Raft for a class. I had a ton of log messages getting dumped out to the screen, and on my terminal, the lines always wrap. Maybe there’s a setting to enable horizontal scrolling, but I couldn’t find it. With Eshell, that just comes right out of the box.

On top of getting long lines to play nice, I can also use the powerful search and filtering operations that I’m used to using to navigate my code to navigate through my terminal history.

There’s a lot more, but those features have intrigued me enough that I wanted to make it easy to pop open to Eshell whenever I could. Here’s what I use:

;; Don't forget to bind these functions to convenient keys
(defun startup-eshell ()
  "Fire up an eshell buffer or open the previous one"
  (interactive)
  (if (get-buffer-window "*eshell*<42>")
      (delete-window (get-buffer-window "*eshell*<42>"))
    (eshell 42)))

(defun tab-to-eshell ()
  "Open a tab with eshell. If that tab doesn't exist, create it. If already in that tab, switch to previous tab."
  (interactive)
  (if (equal (tab-bar-tab-name-current) "*eshell*<43>")
      (tab-bar-switch-to-prev-tab)
    (eshell 43)))

(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
             '("\\*eshell\\*<43>"
               (display-buffer-in-tab)
               (tab-name . "*eshell*<43>")))
(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
             '("\\*eshell\\*<42>"
               (display-buffer-in-side-window)
               (side . left)
               (window-width . 0.5)
               (window-height . fit-window-to-buffer)))

I wanted to be able to open an Eshell buffer on the left side of the window whenever, and I also wanted to be able to make a dedicated tab that I could toggle between easily. With startup-eshell and tab-to-eshell respectively, I can do just that.

Org-Roam #

I like using Org-roam for note taking. I wanted to make the backlinks buffer always appear in a narrow-ish window on the right. Here’s all the config needed:

;; Dedicated side window for backlinks
(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
             '("\\*org-roam\\*"
               (display-buffer-in-side-window)
               (side . right)
               (window-width . 0.4)
               (window-height . fit-window-to-buffer)))

Things to note #

There’s a difference between display-buffer-in-side-window and display-buffer-in-direction: the first, if I’m not mistaken, makes a dedicated window, which you can read about on Mickey Petersen’s site. The short of it is, that buffer will stay in that space and will not move, even if you’re used to your windows automatically re-laying out with e.g. evil-mode enabled.

The second is a little gentler, at least in my mind. It asks Emacs to open the buffer in one direction rather than another, and it’s just as if you had done C-x 2 or C-x 3 for up/down or left/right respectively.

Yet again, this is another testament to the fantastic power and flexibility of Emacs. This isn’t a life-changing configuration per se, but it definitely makes Emacs more comfortable to use for me.