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### 6.9 Hiding/Showing the ECB windows

With `ecb-toggle-ecb-windows`, `ecb-hide-ecb-windows` and `ecb-show-ecb-windows` you can hide/show all the ECB windows without changing the activation state of ECB and also without deactivating the advices for `delete-other-windows` and/or `delete-window`. This is most useful if you use a layout like “top2” (see Common use-cases) or if you want to have maximum space for editing and you don’t need the browsing windows all the time.

The following sequence of hooks is evaluated during showing again the hidden ECB-windows:

1. `ecb-show-ecb-windows-before-hook`
2. `ecb-redraw-layout-before-hook`
3. <Redrawing the layout to show the hidden ECB-windows>
4. `ecb-redraw-layout-after-hook`
5. `ecb-show-ecb-windows-after-hook`

The following sequence of hooks is evaluated during hiding the ECB-windows:

1. `ecb-hide-ecb-windows-before-hook`
2. `ecb-redraw-layout-before-hook`
3. <Hiding the ECB-windows>
4. `ecb-redraw-layout-after-hook`
5. `ecb-hide-ecb-windows-after-hook`

If the special ECB-windows are hidden (e.g. by ‘ecb-toggle-ecb-windows’) all adviced functions behave as their originals. So the frame can be used as if ECB would not be active but ECB IS still active in the “background” and all ECB-commands and all ECB-keybindings can be used. Of course some of them doesn’t make much sense but nevertheless they can be called. Toggling the visibility of the ECB-windows preserves the splitting-state of the edit-area: If you hide the ECB-windows then the frame will be divided in the same window-layout the edit-area had before the hiding and if you show the ECB-windows again the edit-area will be divided into all the edit-windows the ECB-frame had before the showing.

Therefore it should be enough to hide the ECB-windows to run other Emacs-applications which have their own window-layout-managing. There should be no conflicts. But nevertheless the most recommended method for running ECB and other applications (e.g. xrefactory, Gnus etc.) in the same frame is to use a window-manager like winring.el or escreen.el (see Window-managers and ECB).

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