Emacs 28.0.50: turning commands into new frames

tl;dr: try out C-x 5 5! (will be available in 28.1)

Emacs' frames are mighty powerful, though they can easily turn into a mess of windows.. but that's not what I wanted to share here.

Today, I wanted to open up an Info page in its own frame. That way I could keep it up and try out some command that typically mucks about with the current window setup. So, to avoid that a new frame would be handy – I thought – and so I went looking into the C-x 5 prefix's bindings:

C-x 5 C-h:

Global Bindings Starting With C-x 5:
key             binding
---             -------

C-x 5 C-f       find-file-other-frame
C-x 5 C-o       display-buffer-other-frame
C-x 5 .         xref-find-definitions-other-frame
C-x 5 0         delete-frame
C-x 5 1         delete-other-frames
C-x 5 2         make-frame-command
C-x 5 5         other-frame-prefix
C-x 5 b         switch-to-buffer-other-frame
C-x 5 d         dired-other-frame
C-x 5 f         find-file-other-frame
C-x 5 m         compose-mail-other-frame
C-x 5 o         other-frame
C-x 5 p         project-other-frame-command
C-x 5 r         find-file-read-only-other-frame

This one caught my eye – its new and coming in Emacs 28.1!

C-x 5 5         other-frame-prefix

So, to get my new frame with my desired Info page up, I hit the following keys:

C-x 5 5 M-x i n f o <RET>

That's it.


I keep up with the development branch of Emacs (mirrored on GitHub) on all my machines – and its coming features like this that remind me how much folks still care about Emacs and why I ought to keep up with the latest development efforts. Between general API improvements and the performance gains of Native Compilation, Emacs is a worthy tool to belong to every and any pragmatic fool (I dare you to be pragmatic when elisp is at your fingertips).