bug#63676: cancelling editable dired causes UI problems with dired

[Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de>]

Thierry Volpiatto <thievol@posteo.net> writes:

> You could avoid such problem by creating a dired buffer with _only_ the
> files you want to modify (helm allows this), then switch to wdired-mode
> and do your modifications.
> Probably implementing this in dired (i.e. open a new dired buffer with
> only marked files) would be a good addition.

Thanks for mentioning this.  Yes, we definitely want something like
this.  I was experimenting with such "helper" dired buffers myself
(inspired by Icicles and Helm among others).

It's surprisingly hard to integrate such buffers into the dired concept,
though: you can't advertise them (else they would be displayed when you
"open the respective directory").  If you don't advertise them, file
changes in other buffers (like renamings) are not propagated into these
additional buffers.  Of course it must also work into the other
direction.  Implementing this feature in a proper manner is not as easy
as it seems I think (you don't accidently want to take the
opportunity?).

OTOH, performing such more complex renaming operations should be
supported as conveniently as possible in "standard" dired buffers.

Regards,

Michael.