Question

My Emacs frame looks like this:

+---------------------------+
|             |             |
|             |             |
|             |      B      |
|      A      |             |
|             |             |
|             |             |
|             |-------------|
|             |      C      |
+---------------------------+

C is usually a terminal with some kind of long-running process, like a web server or daemon. Unfortunately, all sorts of things like to switch the buffer in that window and occasionally it gets resized. How can I lock the buffer and height of window C?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to be annoyed by window stealing and resizing, put the following lines in your .emacs for a definitive solution that works even with libraries like gud that tries to open a new frame when they can’t steal your windows :

(see this answer for info on the following advice)

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

(ad-activate 'pop-to-buffer)

;; Toggle window dedication
(defun toggle-window-dedicated ()
  "Toggle whether the current active window is dedicated or not"
  (interactive)
  (message
   (if (let (window (get-buffer-window (current-buffer)))
         (set-window-dedicated-p window 
                                 (not (window-dedicated-p window))))
       "Window '%s' is dedicated"
     "Window '%s' is normal")
   (current-buffer)))

;; Press [pause] key in each window you want to "freeze"
(global-set-key [pause] 'toggle-window-dedicated)

and customize pop-up-windows variable to nil.

you could also use StickyWindows instead of window-dedicated feature.