Re: Is it time to create more subdirs in lisp/?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I've been in proprietary projects with around 20,000 files in them, all
> in directories with ~8-10 files in each.  Visiting a file in such a
> hierarchy is a nightmare, as you have to enter, perhaps, 6 successive
> directory names to get there.  That's a lot of names to have to navigate
> through.

I think we all agree on this, yes.  Luckily in Emacs we get to choose
"f(l)at" trees which work best with our default file-selector.  OTOH it
would also be good for Emacs to be able to better handle such
deep hierarchies.

Currently, the file-selector offers the possibility to type "~/e/e/e
TAB" or even "~/eee TAB" to mean "~/etc/emacs/emacs.el", but it'd be
good to be able to go further (maybe not as default, but via some new
completion-style).

E.g. to allow "**/fo TAB" to complete to some file starting with "fo" in
some subdirectory.  Or maybe even to let "a/fo TAB" to complete to
a file with prefix "fo" in a subdirectory of a subdirectory with prefix
"a" (e.g. "toto/apple/blabla/foo.el").

The difficult part is likely to be how to handle the performance issue,
e.g. make sure we only do recursive searches when the user intends to do
such a thing.  Also probably do the search breadth-first to avoid
spending too much time in some deep irrelevant subtree.


        Stefan