Re: A Modest Proposal

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

>>>>> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I think the basic design is misguided. There is so much talk about matching
> up "ls" parameters to internal stuff that it makes my head swim. (Even if
> I'm not feverish.) C'mon. We're not barbarians. We can read directories
> ourselves.

Maybe the default behavior for dired should be to just use opendir.  That
sounds like a good idea to me.

However, dired does a heck of a lot more than just call "ls": It lets you act
on anything with the same basic format, such as output from "find" or "ack".
So, the regexps are handy in that they're allowing a common, "group of files"
browsing metaphor on lots of stuff that just looks like, well, a group of
files.

Another random idea that just occurred to me: Given any compilation buffer,
create a dired buffer from it containing only the files that had errors.
Sometimes useful when I want to search/replace across every non-compiling
file.

Resuming: I wonder how would your proposal normalize that information? Would
it use a Dired API to populate the buffer, rather than filling it with text
and applying a bunch of regexps after the fact?

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2