bug#56311: [PATCH] new function: delete-visited-file

[Zachary Kanfer]

It's interesting to see commentary about how one shouldn't want to kill buffers. There is a lot of functionality revolving around killing buffers.

> ...each time I see suggestions for features to kill unused buffers or
> see people who are worried about such buffers, I raise a brow: in
> Emacs, we generally don't care about that (because it does no harm to
> have unused buffers)...

I use desktop-mode. So I currently have 267 buffers open in my Emacs. Perhaps you might think I'm "doing it wrong", but I find that the more buffers I have open, the longer it takes to find a given buffer. The more open buffers I have open, the greater the chance I'll accidently switch to the wrong one. Sometimes I know that I want a file to go away -- why keep the buffer around?

> And since deleting the visited file is currently very easy, as Eli
> pointed out:
>
> >  M-x delete-file RET M-n RET
>
> I don't think this would be a command that people would use a lot.

Personally, I never want to delete a file and keep the buffer around. So I have replaced *all* my usages of `delete-file` with this new one.

There are many ways to work with Emacs -- many workflows I don't know why this one is considered wrong.

On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 12:29 PM Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> wrote:

Hello,

On Thu 30 Jun 2022 at 12:27pm +02, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> And since deleting the visited file is currently very easy, as Eli
> pointed out:
>
>   M-x delete-file RET M-n RET

There's also C-x C-j D.

> I don't think this would be a command that people would use a lot.

They shouldn't be using it a lot, and I agree that it probably shouldn't
be added, but it does seem worth noting that a lot of users have
something like this in their init, and use it a lot.  I did until today,
and used it almost daily.  (After reading this thread, I've replaced it
with something calling bury-buffer.)  It's also to be found in Spacemacs
and Doom Emacs.

--
Sean Whitton