Node: Overview, Next: , Previous: Install and first steps, Up: Top



Overview

ECB is a global minor-mode which offers a couple of ECB-windows for browsing your sources comfortable with the mouse and the keyboard. These "special" windows are also called tree-buffer in this manual. Every item in such a tree-buffer, i.e. every line, is also called a node of this tree-buffer. See Tree-buffer styles to get an impression about the look&feel of these tree-buffers. There are currently three different types of ECB-windows/tree-buffers:

In addition to these "special" ECB-windows you have always one or two edit-windows (see The edit-window) in the ECB-frame and at the bottom a compilation-window (optional), where all the output of Emacs-compilation (compile, grep etc.) is shown (see Temp- and compile-buffers).

The following "ascii-screenshot" illustrates the typical layout of the ECB-frame1:

   ------------------------------------------------------------------
   |              |                                                 |
   |  Directories |                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   |--------------|                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   |  Sources     |                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   |--------------|                 Edit-window(s)                  |
   |              |        (can be splitted in two windows)         |
   |  Methods     |                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   |--------------|                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   |  History     |                                                 |
   |              |                                                 |
   ------------------------------------------------------------------
   |                                                                |
   |                 Compilation-window (optional)                  |
   |                                                                |
   ------------------------------------------------------------------
   

In the following subsections the "special" ECB-windows will be explained in detail.


Footnotes

  1. This is only one example of the layouts ECB offers, see Changing the ECB-layout