elisp - Emacs: Preventing gud & pdb from controlling windows

Question

I'm using pdb to debug Python programs and am unhappy with it's behaviour.

I have the screen divided into multiple emacs windows, and when I execute pdb, it (randomly?) replaces one of the windows with the output of the *gud* debugger.

Also, when a breakpoint is encountered, even if the debugging buffer is already visible in a window, it usually puts this buffer into another window, and replaces another of my windows with the contents of the source file. (incidentally I like that it jumps to the correct line in the source file)

How can I disable gud/pdb from managing my windows for me? Is it possible in emacs to prevent all programattic manipulation of windows & screen layout?

Edit: I found the answer that partially solves this in another post: toggle dedicated windows

Answer 1

I tried all these approaches without success on Emacs 24. If you are still interested I reverted to the old gdb behavior using 'gud-gdb' which implements the old behavior of gdb/emacs interaction (no dedicated-windows and no I/O buffer). If you don't want to call M-x gud-gdb when you use it, you can define an alias for M-x gdb