Re: dired should clear marks after most operations, or something

[Michael J Downes]

eliz@is.elta.co.il (Eli Zaretskii) writes:

> Removing the marks by default would be wrong IMHO, if you indeed want to 
> perform more than a single operation: marking those files could have 
> taken lots of labor.

I agree that irretrievable loss of the marks is a bad idea. But I claim
however that persistence of the marks under current circumstances is
rather worse, because of the potential for various kinds of file system
destruction, and it is especially troublesome for the less experienced
users (who are least likely to know how to submit a bug report).
Therefore I think it should be considered whether to make some change in
this area. Perhaps clearing the marks after a group operation but
providing an easy way to re-mark with the previous set of marks. But
maybe someone can suggest a better idea.

If clearing the marks after a group operation was made the default, you
would no doubt get a number of complaints from experienced users who are
accustomed to the status quo. But what I believe is happening right now
is that many less experienced users are running into problems with this
design decision and are revising their judgment of Emacs downward
because of it. For many people, all it takes is one incident of
destroying a lot of files by accident and they swear off an application
forever.

> How about an optional feature whereby Emacs will ask for confirmation and 
> show the list of affected files, just like it does with deletion?

You mean for the dired ! command? It does that confirmation for me now
(20.7), before prompting for the command to use.