In a 2 window setup, is there a way to make all temporary popup buffers (help, compile, occur, etc) always open in a specific window?

For example, I have a left and right window. I do most of my work in the left window. When I lookup something in help it opens in the right window which is what I want.

But let’s say I’m in the right window already and look up help, it will open in the left window. Is there a way to make it always open in the right?

  • TibbledigginsOPBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Thank you all for tips. My elisp skills are pretty poor so I’m having trouble figuring out how to make this work, even copying examples online. For example:

    (add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist '("*help*"
                                     (display-buffer-reuse-window)
                                     (display-buffer-in-side-window . ((side . right)
                                                                       (window-width . 0.5)))))

(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist '("*info*"
                                     (display-buffer-reuse-window)
                                     (display-buffer-in-side-window . ((side . right)
                                                                       (window-width . 0.5)))))

    With that in my init.el, if I open emacs and look up “help” it creates a new window on the right, which is the default behavior so I can’t say for sure if the code is doing anything. If I select a link in the help file (like the manual) that opens “info” it opens it back in the left window.

    What am I doing wrong here?