Emacs improvements

Emacs improvements

[Davin Pearson]

On my website (www.davinpearson.com) I have outlined 12 different
improvements to Emacs.  Only one of these have I submitted to the
Emacs Lisp List at DAMTP, Cambridge University, namely trashcan.el.

Would it be worthwhile to my time to submit all of my improvements to
the Emacs Lisp List?

Another thing that I thought of today is how I have made dired to
behave like Windows Explorer on steriods in the following ways:

Different files appear in different colours (e.g. folders appear in
blue, *.png appears lightmagenta, *.c appears in bold and HTML
documents appear with a yellow background.  Text documents and
fundamental mode documents appear with no decoration at all.

Pressing return on certain files such as images runs cygstart to
launch that an appropriate program much like Windows Explorer.

I have personally found Emacs' font lock support very useful and I
imagine other Emacs users would find my code helpful too.

-- 
Sincerely and kindest regards, Davin.
Davin Pearson    http://www.davinpearson.com

Re: Emacs improvements

[Deniz Dogan]

011/1/5 Davin Pearson <davin.pearson@gmail.com>:
> Pressing return on certain files such as images runs cygstart to
> launch that an appropriate program much like Windows Explorer.
>

My first thought here was: Emacs can display images.

Sorry, I don't have a good response to your actual question.

-- 
Deniz Dogan

Re: Emacs improvements

[Tim X]

Davin Pearson <davin.pearson@gmail.com> writes:

> On my website (www.davinpearson.com) I have outlined 12 different
> improvements to Emacs.  Only one of these have I submitted to the
> Emacs Lisp List at DAMTP, Cambridge University, namely trashcan.el.
>
> Would it be worthwhile to my time to submit all of my improvements to
> the Emacs Lisp List?
>
> Another thing that I thought of today is how I have made dired to
> behave like Windows Explorer on steriods in the following ways:
>
> Different files appear in different colours (e.g. folders appear in
> blue, *.png appears lightmagenta, *.c appears in bold and HTML
> documents appear with a yellow background.  Text documents and
> fundamental mode documents appear with no decoration at all.
>
> Pressing return on certain files such as images runs cygstart to
> launch that an appropriate program much like Windows Explorer.
>
> I have personally found Emacs' font lock support very useful and I
> imagine other Emacs users would find my code helpful too.

I think you should certainly make your code available. This has two
benefits. Anyone interested enough can install and try out your
modifications, providing a good testing base for finding bugs and
refining how things work and secondly, if it is used/adopted by a lot of
people, it adds weight to any argument for making it part of standard
emacs. 

Provided the functionality can be disabled, it does not adversely impact
performance when running under a text console or remotely over X and is
well supported on all platforms that support emacs, I have no problems
with your proposals, except maybe the last one. I dislike systems that
try to be too smart because too often they get it wrong. I find the
existing dired features do what you suggest pretty well already.
Perhapse, we could change default values (though need a very good
argument), make features more obvious via documentation improvements or
perhaps unify setup/configuration in some way. Most of what you suggest
already appears to be there 

         * Images supported by emacs are displayed when I hit enter on
           them already. Most common image formats are already supported.
         * dired-guess-shell functionality provides pretty good defaults
           for 'executing' programs and I don't see where your
           suggestion would improve it.
         * I really like keeping the act of executing a file and viewing
           or editing it distinct and would prefer not to see that
           'muddied'. Currently, enter for editing, v for viewing and !
           for executing.
         * I don't necessarily want external programs run when I hit
           enter or view file for many programs i.e. html, ps, etc
         * doc-view handles display of many file types already i.e. pdf,
           dvi, etc
         * browse-url handles display/rendering of html content already,
           though you do need to setup a hot key or tweak
           dired-guess-shell setup
         * Given emacs is single threaded, I'm not convinced it makes a
           really good general purpose file browser. It certainly makes
           sense in the context of viewing/editing content, bu for
           general execution of programs, I'm more likely to use an OS
           level file browser.

Of course, this is just one opinion. Certainly make your code available
if you can as that gives the most choice. 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Emacs improvements

[Bastien]

Hi David,

Davin Pearson <davin.pearson@gmail.com> writes:

> On my website (www.davinpearson.com) I have outlined 12 different
> improvements to Emacs.  Only one of these have I submitted to the
> Emacs Lisp List at DAMTP, Cambridge University, namely trashcan.el.

Can you send a link to the 12 improvements?  I can find this:

http://davin.50webs.com/prog/how-to-use-emacs.html
http://davin.50webs.com/research/2006/mopa2e.html
http://davin.50webs.com/research/2010/mopa2e2.html

but I'm not sure this is what you're talking about.

> Would it be worthwhile to my time to submit all of my improvements to
> the Emacs Lisp List?

It will be worthwhile your time (and Emacs developers time) if you
submit *each one* of your improvements as a separate feature request,
with patches against the current code.

Best,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Emacs improvements

[Jay Belanger]

> On my website (www.davinpearson.com) I have outlined 12 different
> improvements to Emacs.  Only one of these have I submitted to the
> Emacs Lisp List at DAMTP, Cambridge University, namely trashcan.el.

I only saw six at first, but I found the others.  Perhaps all twelve
should all be on the same page.

> Would it be worthwhile to my time to submit all of my improvements to
> the Emacs Lisp List?

Absolutely.  Do it.
(You should probably add a description of how to use the features
provided by each file at the top of the file, though.)

Re: Emacs improvements

[Thamer Mahmoud]

Davin Pearson <davin.pearson@gmail.com> writes:

> Different files appear in different colours (e.g. folders appear in
> blue, *.png appears lightmagenta, *.c appears in bold and HTML
> documents appear with a yellow background.  Text documents and
> fundamental mode documents appear with no decoration at all.
>

I have recently written a package to achieve just that. It's called
Diredful. Get it from here:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Diredful

> Pressing return on certain files such as images runs cygstart to
> launch that an appropriate program much like Windows Explorer.
>

I use a combination of dired-guess-shell-alist-user and mailcap.el (on
Linux). Something like this:

(setq dired-guess-shell-alist-user
      (list
       ;; mailcap.el doesn't support double extensions?
       (list "\\.pdf.gz" "run-mailcap *")
       (list "\\.png" "xloadimage *")))

Then running dired-do-shell-command on a file will give you a useful
list of commands to run. This works for me, although mailcap.el doesn't
seamlessly integrate with dired-guess-*, and the mailcap format isn't
very friendly.

HTH

-- 
Thamer

RE: Emacs improvements

[Drew Adams]

> I have made dired to behave like Windows Explorer on steriods...
>
> Pressing return on certain files such as images runs cygstart to
> launch that an appropriate program much like Windows Explorer.

FYI - in Dired+:

1. `C-RET' opens the file using its MS Windows file association.
   So a PDF file might open using Acrobat.  An image file might
   open using Irfanview.  A music file...

2. `M-RET' opens Windows Explorer to the file or folder.

3. `RET' opens a file or folder normally (in Emacs).

Each is kept separate, so you can choose #1, #2, or #3 for a given file at
different times.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredPlus

Re: Emacs improvements

[Davin Pearson]

On 5 January 2011 09:37, Deniz Dogan <deniz.a.m.dogan@gmail.com> wrote:
> My first thought here was: Emacs can display images.

Emacs can only display some images.


-- 
Sincerely and kindest regards, Davin.
Davin Pearson    http://www.davinpearson.com

Re: Emacs improvements

[Davin Pearson]

> Can you send a link to the 12 improvements?  I can find this:
>
> http://davin.50webs.com/research/2006/mopa2e.html
> http://davin.50webs.com/research/2010/mopa2e2.html

Each of the above two links contain 6 separate improvements to Emacs
that I have written.

-- 
Sincerely and kindest regards, Davin.
Davin Pearson    http://www.davinpearson.com

Re: Emacs improvements

[Tassilo Horn]

Davin Pearson <davin.pearson@gmail.com> writes:

> On 5 January 2011 09:37, Deniz Dogan <deniz.a.m.dogan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> My first thought here was: Emacs can display images.
>
> Emacs can only display some images.

With the current bzr trunk, emacs can use ImageMagick as backend.  I
don't think there are too many image formats that ImageMagick doesn't
handle.

Bye,
Tassilo