bug#63676: cancelling editable dired causes UI problems with dired

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > You could avoid such problem by creating a dired buffer with _only_ the
> > files you want to modify (helm allows this), then switch to wdired-mode
> > and do your modifications.
> > Probably implementing this in dired (i.e. open a new dired buffer with
> > only marked files) would be a good addition.
> 
> Thanks for mentioning this.  Yes, we definitely want something like
> this.  I was experimenting with such "helper" dired buffers myself
> (inspired by Icicles and Helm among others).
> 
> It's surprisingly hard to integrate such buffers into the dired concept,
> though: you can't advertise them (else they would be displayed when you
> "open the respective directory").  If you don't advertise them, file
> changes in other buffers (like renamings) are not propagated into these
> additional buffers.  Of course it must also work into the other
> direction.  Implementing this feature in a proper manner is not as easy
> as it seems I think (you don't accidently want to take the
> opportunity?).
> 
> OTOH, performing such more complex renaming operations should be
> supported as conveniently as possible in "standard" dired buffers.

(Caveat: I haven't followed this thread.)

With Dired+ you can create a Dired buffer for any
arbitrary list of files & dirs, even interactively,
in several ways.  Such a buffer isn't connected
with any particular directory listings (whether by
`ls' or ls-lisp).

E.g., commands `diredp-marked(-other-window)' do
it for the marked files & dirs in a Dired buffer.
(`C-M-*' is bound to `diredp-marked-other-window'.)

You can then use WDired on such buffer, to make any
changes you like.

Dired+ hasn't tried to fix any WDired problems, so
some WDired problems that you pointed to might
still be problematic with Dired+; dunno.  I'm not
an expert on WDired, and I haven't tried to look
into use cases etc.  But for the case you describe
it seems to work OK (superficial testing).


https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/dired%2b.el