1 The SXEmacs Frame

Frame

In many environments, such as a tty terminal, an SXEmacs frame literally takes up the whole screen. If you are running SXEmacs in a multi-window system like the X Window System, the SXEmacs frame takes up one X window. See SXEmacs under X, for more information.

Window

No matter what environment you are running in, SXEmacs allows you to look at several buffers at the same time by having several windows be part of the frame. Often, the whole frame is taken up by just one window, but you can split the frame into two or more subwindows. If you are running SXEmacs under the X window system, that means you can have several SXEmacs windows inside the X window that contains the SXEmacs frame. You can even have multiple frames in different X windows, each with their own set of subwindows.

Each SXEmacs frame displays a variety of information:

• The biggest area usually displays the text you are editing. It may consist of one window or of two or more windows if you need to look at two buffers a the same time.
• Below each text window’s last line is a mode line (see Mode Line), which describes what is going on in that window. The mode line is in inverse video if the terminal supports that. If there are several SXEmacs windows in one frame, each window has its own mode line.
• At the bottom of each SXEmacs frame is the echo area or minibuffer window(see Echo Area). It is used by SXEmacs to exchange information with the user. There is only one echo area per SXEmacs frame.
• If you are running SXEmacs under a graphical windowing system, a menu bar at the top of the frame makes shortcuts to several of the commands available (see Pull-down Menus).
• Under a graphical windowing system, a toolbar at the top of the frame, just under the menu bar if it exists, provides “one-touch” shortcuts to several commands. (Not yet documented.)
• Under a graphical windowing system, a gutter at the top (under the toolbar) and/or bottom of the frame provides advanced GUI facilities like tab controls for rapid switching among related windows and progress bars for time-consuming operations like downloads across the Internet. Gutters are an experimental feature introduced in SXEmacs version 21.2. (Not yet documented.)

You can subdivide the SXEmacs frame into multiple text windows, and use each window for a different file (see Windows). Multiple SXEmacs windows are tiled vertically on the SXEmacs frame. The upper SXEmacs window is separated from the lower window by its mode line.

When there are multiple, tiled SXEmacs windows on a single SXEmacs frame, the SXEmacs window receiving input from the keyboard has the keyboard focus and is called the selected window. The selected window contains the cursor, which indicates the insertion point. If you are working in an environment that permits multiple SXEmacs frames, and you move the focus from one SXEmacs frame into another, the selected window is the one that was last selected in that frame.

The same text can be displayed simultaneously in several SXEmacs windows, which can be in different SXEmacs frames. If you alter the text in an SXEmacs buffer by editing it in one SXEmacs window, the changes are visible in all SXEmacs windows containing that buffer.