Re: dired-move-to-filename-regexp

[Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I think a better solution is if we can turn off the new "feature"
> of adapting the column widths to the data.

One way would be to extend --format to allow fairly arbitrary formats
that can specify column widths.  For example, Emacs could do this:

  ls --format='%11m %2l %8o %8g %7s %12d %f'

to have "ls" list the mode, link, owner, group, size, date, and file
name in the traditional widths for "ls -l".  This would resemble the
way "ls --time-style" already handles date formats.

Another possibility is to have a new option to disable the new
feature, e.g. "ls --traditional-column-widths".  This would be a bit
easier to implement, but would be less general and might have problems
of its own (e.g., users and implementations don't agree on what the
traditional widths are).

I understand that some non-GNU ls implementations also adapt column
widths to data, so the Emacs problem would remain with these
implementations, regardless of how we change GNU ls.