Re: Rename, delete and move current buffer and file

[Jarosław Rzeszótko]

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 5:28 PM, Yuri Khan <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:59 PM Jarosław Rzeszótko <address@hidden>
wrote:

> It is surprisingly hard to do this in Emacs […]
> You can use dired, but I personally find it to be a distraction for this
use case.

Why?

I personally most often want this when working on a programming project, I have a bunch of files open and I am in the middle of a planned sequence of changes, popping up a new buffer and dealing with dired which I do not otherwise use much breaks my concentration. It is hard to explain this fully rationally, but judging by how many .emacs, libraries, wiki pages etc. I have seen that have rename-file-and-buffer in them I am not the only one.

Note that an interactive delete-file function already exists, but it doesn't kill the associated buffer. That's why I consider it a gap in the Emacs set of functions. There are three sets of operations: file operations (rename-file, delete-file), buffer operations (rename-buffer, kill-buffer) and some file+buffer operations (set-visited-file-name). It would be nice if there was some unity among the three sets, so that it would be possible to do the common operations in all three ways (file/buffer/file+buffer), and that the naming is reasonably consistent. Of course backwards compatibility is an issue as always.

 

[...]

> A very similar related pain point is that it is hard to get the path and
directory of the current buffers visited file.

Your favorite binding of ‘find-file’, followed by your preferred method to
get the current line to clipboard. (This breaks if you ‘cd’ to a different
directory while editing a file.)

This is not that easy if you use a completion system like ivy or ido. It's also not nice from an elisp standpoint, that for the two strongly related things, one is accessible only as a variable and the other either as a command or function. 

 

> Finally, while we are discussing functions everyone re-implements in
their .emacs, please lets make transpose-windows happen as an Emacs builtin
:)

You mean the windcycle library?

I mean:

https://github.com/bbatsov/crux/blob/master/crux.el#L471

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TransposeWindows

Sure there are packages to do this, it just seems strange among the many built-in window functions there is no transpose. Again, you will easily find very many .emacs on the web implementing a function like this, which for me looks like a bit of gap in what is provided out-of-the-box.

Cheers,

Jarosław Rzeszótko

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 5:28 PM, Yuri Khan <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:59 PM Jarosław Rzeszótko <address@hidden>
wrote:

> It is surprisingly hard to do this in Emacs […]
> You can use dired, but I personally find it to be a distraction for this
use case.

Why?

I think of deleting, renaming and moving as operations on the file as a
whole and not on its content, so saving the file and going “outside” it is
the intuitive first step for me. ‘dired-jump’ takes me to the Dired buffer
of the enclosing directory and puts point on the file. It’s on C-x C-j by
default, but I bind it on <M-S-up> so my fingers think going “outside” is a
single spatial movement.

If I want to delete the file, I press D and confirm. To rename, I press R
and enter the new name; the buffer is renamed automatically.

When copying or moving files, I prefer to see the target directory before I
do it. So, I split the window, switch there, navigate to the target
directory, switch back, R (or C to copy), RET (because with
‘dired-dwim-target’ set to non-nil the target directory is automatically
suggested as the default), then deal with any changes to the window
configuration.

Note here the DWIM behavior: R suggests the directory in the other window,
but if there is no other window, then the current directory.

> A very similar related pain point is that it is hard to get the path and
directory of the current buffers visited file.

Your favorite binding of ‘find-file’, followed by your preferred method to
get the current line to clipboard. (This breaks if you ‘cd’ to a different
directory while editing a file.)

> Finally, while we are discussing functions everyone re-implements in
their .emacs, please lets make transpose-windows happen as an Emacs builtin
:)

You mean the windcycle library?