Aside is a package written with the aim of making it easy and convenient to use side windows for arbitrary sets of buffers. Specifically, Aside lets you specify a configuration for a side window which determines which buffers are displayed in that window, where the window is located, which window-specific customisations that window should have, and define a ‘do-what-I-mean’ (DWIM) command for navigating to and toggling the visibility of the window, all in as little as a dozen lines of code. Much of this flexibility springs directly from Emacs’ built-in ‘display-buffer-alist’ variable, however Aside can make it more convenient to define configurations for ‘display-buffer-alist’ that you can easily separate and use independently from one another, and Emacs does not come with any equivalent to the DWIM commands Aside can generate.

Here is an example of a configuration named ‘search’ which displays Grep, Occur, and rg buffers in a side window displayed at the bottom of a frame, with a couple of hooks used to customise the appearance of the buffers it displays, and a DWIM command for showing, jumping to, and hiding that side window. In my testing, the example below works as intended when evaluated after evaluating all the suggested configurations in the .el files in this repo. The names of the variables are significant; an Aside ‘configuration’ is really nothing more than a set of a few variables which are named following a specific convention. The code in ‘aside.el’ can be examined for more information about this.

(setq aside-search-condition
 (rx (or "*Embark Export Grep*" "*grep*" "*Occur*" "*rg*")))

(setq aside-search-action-alist
      '((side . bottom)
        (slot . -1)
        (window-height . 10)))

(setq aside-search-hook
      '(aside-hook-change-default-face-height
        aside-hook-enable-truncate-lines))

(defalias 'aside-search-dwim (aside-window-toggle-dwim 'search))

(aside-enable-configuration 'search)

(define-key global-map (kbd "C-S-s") #'aside-search-dwim)