Re: Friendlier dired experience [CODE INCLUDED]

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>> How 'bout we add it to GNU ELPA and then we work on integrating some of
>>> the code into Dired
>> I'm fine with integrating parts of it into dired, but I wouldn't want it
>> done in a way that breaks the stand-alone package. In other words, the
>> feature super-set (updated) copy from the github upstream should always
>> continue to work.
>
> Of course.  This said, in many/most cases, integration requires changes
> which end up having some impact on the actual user-visible
> functionality.  Whether they're considered as "breaking" or not is often
> a question of point of view.
>
>>>  (i.e. the part that makes sense within Dired itself)?
>> What part do you have in mind?
>
> I don't have any in mind: I use neither Dired nor anything like
> midnight-commander (I do my file-management with zsh, and I don't even
> do that within Emacs), so I'm not the best person to make such calls.
>
> But clearly, some parts of diredc.el don't make sense within Dired
> because they're specific to the dual-pane setup, whereas Dired is
> a single-buffer mode, meant to be independent from window layout.
>
>
>         Stefan
I use Emacs for almost all interaction with the computer, and I do
manage my files with Helm + Dired, so I am always interested to see
something new.

I have skimmed through diredc (readme + code) but I haven't tried it.
As far as I see, the only part I see worth putting directly in dired
is maybe as you pointed out trash management. I don't use Sunrise nor
any other `comander' Ranger clone; it is just not needed. I don't use
trash folder either for that matter, but I can see there is not much of
trash handling offered via Emacs, so maybe some users would prefer to
have such functionality.

Unfortunately for some features, as I read the diredc code; I would
probably be annoyed if they were in dired. Particularly if dired asked
yes/no if I really wish to bookmark a place and if I wish to start
diredc. If user bothered to press a 4-letter combination, then I think 
we can be sure the user wish to create that bookmark; it is really
unnecessary to ask if I am really sure :-). Just my opinion.

Extra colours for chmod: we have it already in Dired+, it looks like a
rainbow, really not very user friendly to give them each different
colour (sorry Drew).

History handling: can it not be handled by recentf/winner modes already?
I am not particulary against custom history handling, but recentf
already does it and winner has undo/redo stack maybe they can be reused?

Ther is a thing I would like to have in Dired, but I haven't got time
myself to look at it: utilisation of new Tab thing. Since tabs seem
to act more like workspaces I would like to see them serialized and
bookmarked so we could use them with Dired. However diredc seems to do
it's own thing instead of reusing the functionality of tabs.

Other functionality I would like to see is some from dired-hacks: toggle
and filters.

For me Helm does the most; dired is needed just sometimes, so it is nice
if we can keep it lightweight. That said it does not mean that Emacs (or
Elpa) can't include a file manager, I would just prefer to keep it
separate from Dired.

Just my opinion as a daily user of Emacs for file managment. I hope
that Boruch does not take it as personal critique, I don't mean it as
such. These are just my subjective opinions, so take them as such.  It
is nice you experiment and play with Dired and file management.

Best regards
/a