How to suppress buffer proliferation in emacs auctex

Question

When latexing, previewing, and jumping to PDF from emacs, there are sometimes errors and problems, in which case emacs throws up a bunch of frames which intrude on the editing window and which I have to close manually somehow. How do you advise I stop this from happening? I would rather go and look at the appropriate buffer if I really care about the error, or even better, the latex error could appear on a separate window which is in the background.

Answer 1

This might be a good starting point (taken from EmacsWiki):

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Bury unwanted buffers ;;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

; necessary support function for buffer burial
(defun crs-delete-these (delete-these from-this-list)
  "Delete DELETE-THESE FROM-THIS-LIST."
  (cond
   ((car delete-these)
    (if (member (car delete-these) from-this-list)
        (crs-delete-these (cdr delete-these) (delete (car delete-these)
                             from-this-list))
      (crs-delete-these (cdr delete-these) from-this-list)))
   (t from-this-list)))
                    ; this is the list of buffers I never want to see
(defvar crs-hated-buffers
  '("KILL" "*Compile-Log*" "*Messages*" "*scratch*" "*auto-install"))
                    ; might as well use this for both
(setq iswitchb-buffer-ignore (append '("^ " "*Buffer") crs-hated-buffers))
(defun crs-hated-buffers ()
  "List of buffers I never want to see, converted from names to buffers."
  (delete nil
          (append
           (mapcar 'get-buffer crs-hated-buffers)
           (mapcar (lambda (this-buffer)
                     (if (string-match "^ " (buffer-name this-buffer))
                         this-buffer))
                   (buffer-list)))))
; I'm sick of switching buffers only to find KILL right in front of me
(defun crs-bury-buffer (&optional n)
  (interactive)
  (unless n
    (setq n 1))
  (let ((my-buffer-list (crs-delete-these (crs-hated-buffers)
                                          (buffer-list (selected-frame)))))
    (switch-to-buffer
     (if (< n 0)
         (nth (+ (length my-buffer-list) n)
              my-buffer-list)
       (bury-buffer)
       (nth n my-buffer-list)))))
(global-set-key [(control tab)] 'crs-bury-buffer)
(global-set-key [(control meta tab)] (lambda ()
                                       (interactive)
                                       (crs-bury-buffer -1)))

Add the names of the buffers you never want to see to crs-hated-buffers.