Re: autorevert.el

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:

> > Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 22:56:31 -0600 (CST)
> > From: Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>
> > 
> > What this could mean is that autoreverting of dired buffers may not
> > work on MS-Windows or maybe that, on MS-windows, one could just
> > automatically autorevert dired buffers every auto-revert-interval
> > seconds, assuming one has a reasonably fast computer (admittedly a
> > very suboptimal solution).
> 
> Both of these alternatives sound wrong to me.  I think on Windows
> Emacs should listen to the special message sent by the OS whenever the
> contents of some directory changes.  I believe this is how the Windows
> Explorer and other programs know when to refresh their views of files
> in a directory.

I had the same problem in ido-mode, which wants to cache directory
contents to speed up operations.  On Windoze, this doesn't work
because cached directories don't get refreshed automatically.

My (primitive) solution was to let the user refresh directories on
demand (with C-l).  If this could be automated, it would be fine.

However this would still be pretty useless (or make things perform
worse), if the effect of receiving a "some directory updated" message
would be to clear the whole directory cache (in case the message
doesn't indicate which directory changed -- does it?).

If somebody wants to work on adding that message functionality,
I will adapt ido to use it.

I suppose adding a w32-directory-changed-functions hook variable
would be the proper mechanism; members on the hook should be functions
with one arg -- the file name of directory which changed (if available).

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk