Re: isearch multiple buffers

[Thomas Link <t.link@gmx.at>]

Hi,

Somebody put me on the cc list. I currently don't use emacs and (to my 
knowledge) I'm not??? the present maintainer of filesets but I'd like to 
comment on a few statements.

> filesets.el is a promising package with presently poor user interface.
> It displays a list of selected buffers only in the menu (not available
> when the menu is turned off) or in a Customize buffer that displays one
> customizable variable as a set of files.
AFAIK emacs provides a way to access menus from the command line. Also, 
filesets commands can be used without using the menu. IIRC you also have 
command line completion for the most important commands. On many (all?) 
platforms/GUI toolkits, the menu can be torn off. The menu will then 
remain open after having selected an item. Menus are quite versatile. 
Back then, it thus looked like a good idea to me to use menus.

> I think a better way to display
> filesets would be UI like provided by buffer-list, i.e. a special buffer
> that displays a set of files and allows easily doing operations on them.
>   
Today, I'd actually prefer this (or a similar) approach. The filesets 
data becomes quite big after a while and the data is kept in memory all 
the time. It thus seems preferable to display the information in an 
emacs buffer that can be unloaded when not in use. Actually, today I'd 
rather save the information as plain text file and implement the 
functionality as a "filesets mode". This would also provide for a way to 
easily split the filesets data into subsets. Emacs folding/outline mode 
could be used as rather low-diet ui.

Another option would be to integrate it with sidebar, which solves a not 
all too different problem. I have never used sidebar on the terminal though.

I assume though that most (new) users would prefer menus because most 
other applications they use work this way -- unless they have already 
reached the point where they use emacs for everything :-) .

> On the www site of the filesets project I've found a file filesets2.el
> that contains features missing in the Emacs version of filesets.el.
> These features provide integration with dired and ibuffer: there are
> special commands to add a buffer from the ibuffer's buffer list to
> a fileset, and to add dired marked buffers to a fileset.  I wonder
> why the author didn't include them to Emacs.
>   
Back then I used xemacs most of the time (mostly because compilation was 
slightly easier on cygwin/windows). xemacs has cl loaded by default, and 
I considered it preferable to use its functions. I don't think this 
version has been thoroughly tested with emacs.

Regards,
Thomas.