Re: Rename, delete and move current buffer and file

["Jarosław Rzeszótko" <jrzeszotko@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4629 bytes --]

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 5:28 PM, Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:59 PM Jarosław Rzeszótko <jrzeszotko@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > It is surprisingly hard to do this in Emacs […]
> > You can use dired, but I personally find it to be a distraction for this
> use case.
>
> Why?
>

I personally most often want this when working on a programming project, I
have a bunch of files open and I am in the middle of a planned sequence of
changes, popping up a new buffer and dealing with dired which I do not
otherwise use much breaks my concentration. It is hard to explain this
fully rationally, but judging by how many .emacs, libraries, wiki pages
etc. I have seen that have rename-file-and-buffer in them I am not the only
one.

Note that an interactive delete-file function already exists, but it
doesn't kill the associated buffer. That's why I consider it a gap in the
Emacs set of functions. There are three sets of operations: file operations
(rename-file, delete-file), buffer operations (rename-buffer, kill-buffer)
and some file+buffer operations (set-visited-file-name). It would be nice
if there was some unity among the three sets, so that it would be possible
to do the common operations in all three ways (file/buffer/file+buffer),
and that the naming is reasonably consistent. Of course backwards
compatibility is an issue as always.


> [...]


> > A very similar related pain point is that it is hard to get the path and
> directory of the current buffers visited file.
>
> Your favorite binding of ‘find-file’, followed by your preferred method to
> get the current line to clipboard. (This breaks if you ‘cd’ to a different
> directory while editing a file.)
>

This is not that easy if you use a completion system like ivy or ido. It's
also not nice from an elisp standpoint, that for the two strongly related
things, one is accessible only as a variable and the other either as a
command or function.


>
> > Finally, while we are discussing functions everyone re-implements in
> their .emacs, please lets make transpose-windows happen as an Emacs builtin
> :)
>
> You mean the windcycle library?
>

I mean:

https://github.com/bbatsov/crux/blob/master/crux.el#L471
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TransposeWindows

Sure there are packages to do this, it just seems strange among the many
built-in window functions there is no transpose. Again, you will easily
find very many .emacs on the web implementing a function like this, which
for me looks like a bit of gap in what is provided out-of-the-box.

Cheers,
Jarosław Rzeszótko


On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 5:28 PM, Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:59 PM Jarosław Rzeszótko <jrzeszotko@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > It is surprisingly hard to do this in Emacs […]
> > You can use dired, but I personally find it to be a distraction for this
> use case.
>
> Why?
>
> I think of deleting, renaming and moving as operations on the file as a
> whole and not on its content, so saving the file and going “outside” it is
> the intuitive first step for me. ‘dired-jump’ takes me to the Dired buffer
> of the enclosing directory and puts point on the file. It’s on C-x C-j by
> default, but I bind it on <M-S-up> so my fingers think going “outside” is a
> single spatial movement.
>
> If I want to delete the file, I press D and confirm. To rename, I press R
> and enter the new name; the buffer is renamed automatically.
>
> When copying or moving files, I prefer to see the target directory before I
> do it. So, I split the window, switch there, navigate to the target
> directory, switch back, R (or C to copy), RET (because with
> ‘dired-dwim-target’ set to non-nil the target directory is automatically
> suggested as the default), then deal with any changes to the window
> configuration.
>
> Note here the DWIM behavior: R suggests the directory in the other window,
> but if there is no other window, then the current directory.
>
> > A very similar related pain point is that it is hard to get the path and
> directory of the current buffers visited file.
>
> Your favorite binding of ‘find-file’, followed by your preferred method to
> get the current line to clipboard. (This breaks if you ‘cd’ to a different
> directory while editing a file.)
>
> > Finally, while we are discussing functions everyone re-implements in
> their .emacs, please lets make transpose-windows happen as an Emacs builtin
> :)
>
> You mean the windcycle library?
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 7873 bytes --]