bug#11233: 24.1.50; Wishlist: dired mouse-2 other window behavior

[Michael Heerdegen]

Hi,

here is a question that Emacs newbies ask often: "How can I configure
dired so that mouse clicks don't create a new window/frame."
Unfortunately, this is currently not trivial.

Obviously, Emacs dired differs from most "common" file browsers which
just replace the current buffer/tab with the content of the clicked
file.

Not every user will like the behavior of Emacs here - we should give
users the possibility to configure this easily.

At least, we should define a new command dired-mouse-find-file
(without "-other-window") which users can bind if they want.  It's
missing.

But since dired is a very basic and widely used tool, and many newbies
will not know hooks, I think it would be a better solution if we could
provide a new user option that controls the behavior of mouse-2 in
dired in this regard.

(Note: if you want to do something like that, please don't forget to
change the tooltips.)


Regards,

Michael.