Easy way to resize/select windows or frames of Emacs

When you're using Emacs in a graphic display (That is, not in a console nor a terminal), you'll have multiple Emacs frames and windows in them.

The default navigation interface of Emacs is quite surprising to the non Emacs users since Emacs provides relative selection machanism.

For example, suppose you have following Emacs frames and windows:

<pre>
+-Frame A------------+   +-Frame B------------+   +-Frame C------------+
|                    |   |                    |   |                    |
| Window A           |   | Window C           |   | Window F           |
|                    |   |                    |   |                    |
|                    |   +--------------------+   |                    |
|                    |   |                    |   |                    |
+--------------------+   | Window D           |   |                    |
|                    |   |                    |   |                    |
| Window B           |   |                    |   |                    |
|                    |   +--------------------+   |                    |
|                    |   |                    |   |                    |
|                    |   | Window E           |   |                    |
+--------------------+   +--------------------+   +--------------------+
</pre>

Emacs provides basic frame selection and window selection commands; other-frame and other-window. They select the next frame or next window from the list in cyclic order. The problem is, the default order may not reflect the coordinates of the frame/window, especially when you moved some frames/windows.

Suppose that the currently selected frame is Frame B in above figure. If Emacs kept the frame list in (Frame#B Frame#A Frame#C), the next frame would be Frame A. Of course, by using negative prefix argument to other-frame function, you can select the previous frame if you want.

What I want is, to select a frame in the order of the actual coordinate of the frames. That is, I want to give a command something like, "select the frame where its X coordinate is the closest to the origin.", or "select the frame where its X coordinate is the second closest to the origin.".

So I made a simple function, wfu/frame-list-ordered, to return an ordered list of frames. Similarly, I made another function, wfu/window-list-ordered, to return an ordered list of windows. Using these two functions, I made two commands; wfu/other-frame-or-window and wfu/other-window-or-frame. wfu/other-frame-or-window will select other(next) frame. If there is no other frame, it will select other(next) window. Similarly, wfu/other-window-or-frame will select other(next) window. If there is no other window, it will select other(next) frame.

Binding a key shortcut to an Emacs command is treaky thing. Since you don't know that whether you can easily memorize new keybindings. Anyway, I found following key sequences are best for my personal use:

N is the number between 0 and 9. Note first window/frame starts from 1, not 0.

Normally, I just stick to C-<tab> to select other window. When I want to select other frame, I'll feed it a negative number; where the absolute value of the number denotes the N-th frame.

You may download wfutils.el from the github.