RE: [h-e-w] dired formating inconsistent

[Dr Francis J. Wright]

> From: 
> address@hidden 
> [mailto:address@hidden
> rg] On Behalf Of Jason Rumney
> Sent: Saturday, 2 October 2004 11:43 am
> To: Sarir Khamsi
> Cc: ntemacs
> Subject: Re: [h-e-w] dired formating inconsistent
> 
> Sarir Khamsi <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > After using Emacs 21.3.50.1 for a bit, I've noticed that 
> the output of 
> > dired does not seem to be consistent: sometimes the listing of the 
> > filenames does not align correctly. Unfortunately, I can't seem to 
> > determine what conditions cause this (eg. certain directories, 
> > filenames, phase of the moon, etc). Has anyone seen this and have a 
> > solution? Thanks.
> 
> The problem is the version of ls you are using. A recent 
> version of GNU ls was changed to vary the column widths based 
> on the length of filenames being listed, instead of having 
> fixed columns. Because Emacs updates the dired buffer with 
> partial directory listings after some operations, the column 
> widths can get out of step with such a version of ls. We have 
> asked the ls developers to give us some way to get fixed 
> width columns, but I do not know what happened to that.

Alternatively, ls-lisp should work, unless something has been changed
dramatically since I last looked at it.  Moreover, I assume it's still the
default if Emacs is built as a native Windows application.  Do you need some
functionality that ls-lisp doesn't provide?

Francis