Collecting shells on Saint Helena

Collecting shells on Saint Helena

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Emacs!

Start Emacs22 with -Q.  Into buffer *scratch* type "foobaz.sh".  Place
point over the text and do "M-x ffap".

Emacs replies with "Pinging foobar.sh (Saint Helena)...".  ?????

This seems a wierd sort of message to give somebody who wants to ffap
his file foobar.sh, but has mistyped the name.  Is this really the right
thing to do?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).

Re: Collecting shells on Saint Helena

[Glenn Morris]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> Start Emacs22 with -Q.  Into buffer *scratch* type "foobaz.sh".  Place
> point over the text and do "M-x ffap".
>
> Emacs replies with "Pinging foobar.sh (Saint Helena)...".  ?????
>
> This seems a wierd sort of message to give somebody who wants to
> ffap his file foobar.sh, but has mistyped the name.

I suppose something which tries to guess what you mean is always going
to make some mistakes, which is the price you pay for convenience.

The behaviour is customizable, eg

(setq ffap-machine-p-known 'reject)

would get you the behaviour you want.

I don't think there's any way for ffap to tell the difference between
a host you might want to ping and a file you might want to open, so it
comes down to a question of what the defaults are.

Maybe in future ffap could check for a "fuzzy" match for a mis-typed
filename.