Re: Scratch buffer annoyance

["Davis Herring" <herring@lanl.gov>]

> But wearing the others out is not going to address the underlying
> technical _facts_ of their objections.  It is not a matter of opinion
> that a string does not carry "file", "buffer", "whatever" markers
> associated with it.

Why do you think we have text properties?  We can even propertize
different parts of the string differently.  So we can have "namename" with
(file t) on the first four characters and (buffer t) on the others to name
both the file and the buffer into which it goes.  Stefan (who wants ".")
can mark that as (directory t absolute nil) which takes care of the
where-emacs-is-run-or-not problem, and if the string is exactly "eval",
then its property list is evalled and we can do whatever else is needed. 
Add a 'mode property, and a 'vars property which is a list of buffer-local
bindings to set (to support buffer-offer-save for persistent *scratch*)...
I bet with this one string-valued variable we could do away with .emacs
altogether!

Davis

PS - What little of this idea isn't sheer madness is of course the same as
what's already proposed: (tag . str) where tag reflects the user's choice
of action: t for a buffer or 'file (or 'url, or...), with support for ~ in
filenames to make absolute names easy to type.

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