"Non-standard UI", was: Re: bug#12492: Acknowledgement (24.2.50; Open vc-dir buffer easier and faster)

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06.03.2020 1:59, Juri Linkov wrote:
> rgrep/vc-git-grep provides good UI.

No, it doesn't. It's the bare-bone-est UI possible, and it wastes a lot 
of horizontal space. It doesn't provide a means to search-and-replace. 
And it's not fit for programmatic construction, so Xref can't use it.

So we can't standardize on it, no matter how much you are used to it.

> > > > Not to mention the unfortunate side-effect of having to visit 4000 buffers.
> > > It visits only matched buffers.
> > No. It looks through all project files and calls 'find-file' on each of
> > them. Which is obviously inevitable since multi-occur only accepts a
> > list of buffers, not files.
> No, it doesn't call 'find-file' on each file, noccur-project
> calls 'find-file' only on files with matches found by grep.

I asked where that command is defined, linked a webpage, you said yes.

But apparently you instead meant the newer version that's only on Github.

Okay then. Only visiting files that have matches is better. But not good 
enough when a string I entered ends up in having an arbitrary number of 
buffers visited, even if that's less than 4000.

It is one of "quality of life" things I have spent quite some effort on 
improving, and to be frank I don't appreciate you handwaving all that 
away by simply saying "non-standard".

None of the "standard" UIs you mentioned provide the functionality we 
need. Grep is async, but cumbersome and has no provision of doing 
anything with the matches: Wgrep is not in Emacs, not even in GNU ELPA, 
and there's no quick "replace matching string with xxx" feature in it 
anyway. Occur only works with buffers, it's not async either, and the 
overhead of visiting who knows how many buffers is basically unlimited 
(Grep is way faster at finding matches than Emacs at visiting files). 
It's objectively *worse* for the purpose at hand, which will be 
especially evident in bigger projects.