I agree, some Emacs commands use windows unintuitively and destructively. Dired and various searching modes (grep, ack, ag) are major offenders. You should (1)

I agree, some Emacs commands use windows unintuitively and destructively. Dired and various searching modes (grep, ack, ag) are major offenders. You should (1) mitigate the problem with winner-mode so you can easily recover your window configuration, and (2) learn enough Elisp to tweak the poorly-thought-out commands. It usually takes me no more than 15 minutes to figure out what function does the wrong thing and add a small snippet of code to my .emacs.d/init.el which either reimplements the behavior or uses Elisp's brilliant advice feature to isolate and override with better behavior. More modern modes usually behave well. Magit, for example, uses windows correctly. Here is an example of how I used advice to fix bad mouse behavior (yes, I use the mouse sometimes to switch windows): http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/7347/preventing-mouse-clicks-in-inactive-windows-from-repositioning-the-cursor http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/7347/preventing-mou...