Re: Short explanation for & in key ! of dired

[Miles Bader]

address@hidden writes:
> & gimp RET
>
> I'd be happier! But, ok, thats my use-case, and I dont really know how
> other people use dired. 

That's exactly what I want too.  When backgrounding, I'm almost always
running some gui app; I do not care about stdout/stderr, and Emacs
clumsy handling of background processes (only one at a time unless you
fiddle with things) is pretty annoying.

The current behavior of backgrounding seems vaguely anacronistic, maybe
from a time when people didn't use a window system.

Incidentally, many gnome apps are extremely sloppy about their output --
if you run them from a terminal you get tons of random debugging junk
(which doesn't for the most part seem to reflect any observable
problem).  This is for standard released apps.  It seems that they are
expected to normally be run in an environment where such output is
discarded.

-miles

-- 
The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the
living tissue of the city.  Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable;
moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere
islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.
[James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960]