Re: Seeking advice on writing a "line-based" major mode

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2015-06-08, at 04:17, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

>> the buffer will contain a bunch of lines, each of them
>> correspoding to some object (basically, I have a vector
>> of these "objects", and I want to display them in some way).
>
> Sounds like a candidate for `tabulated-list-mode'.  You can
> use that to print lines that are composed of one or more
> columns, and a header line that let you sort by any column
> (if you want).

Thanks for your tip, though after consideration I ended up using EWOC.

> [BTW, I would recommend against looking to things like Dired as
> examples for this kind of thing.  Dired is very complex and does
> lots of things in special ways.  And its code has evolved
> organically, so to speak. ;-)  It is not something simple like what
> you describe.  Look instead to things like buff-menu.el (which now
> uses t-l-mode) and `list-faces-display' and `list-colors-display'.

Fair enough.  I was mentioning Dired more to convey my needs than as
a suggestion that I'd like to mimick its implementation - it is far more
complex than what I need.

Regards,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University