Intro

Around September 2024, I also discovered this useful package for emacs windows management transpose-frame.el.

Around this time, I read Tobias' article on doing things that scale¹.

So of course, as a changed man, I sent a simple email asking for tranpose-frame.el to be moved to emacs core. But as it turned out, the package had many things wrong at it's core which would be impossible to fix without a rewrite.

Basiclly, transpose-frame.el relies on "copy pasting" window states(like the buffer, overlays, etc…), which was a faulty approach². The correct approach required new code in emacs C-land to be able to 'necromance' window objects when using the function split-window. For this reason, simply changing up the code in transpose-frame.el would not be sufficant. A full rewrite was required.

So, not knowing how much work was in, I agreed to do it. So after about 4 months of infrequent, painful work³, including constant collaboration with Martin Rudalics, the windows.c and windows.el maintainer who take care of all the code in the C-land size. Now, emacs 31 has all the functionality that transpose-frame.el had, plus extra. The file containg all these comands is window-x.el, which can be found here: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/window-x.el.

Commands

Now, I used a simple layout for the following images simply cause I was too lazy to make more complex ones. Keep in mind, that these commands can work for any complex window layout you can cook up.

I would suggest trying them and playing around with them, but if you don't have emacs 31, this is a preview.

Transpose

M-x transpose-window-layout

This one is basiclly diagonal reflection.

Rotate layout

M-x rotate-window-layout-clockwise

M-x rotate-window-layout-anticlockwise

Flip

M-x flip-window-layout-horizontally

M-x flip-window-layout-vertically

Cycle (rotate windows)

This one is my personal favourite.

M-x rotate-windows

M-x rotate-windows-back

Footnotes