Re: Friendlier dired experience [CODE INCLUDED]

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>> You'd still have the downside that the general bookmarks include all the
>>> other non-directory bookmarks, so maybe it's not a good idea anyway.
>>> [ I'm not using bookmarks very much, so my intuition here is poor.  ]
>> Why would that be a downside?
>
> That you can have name conflicts between the diredc and other bookmarks,
I don't know; usually we are asked to give a name for the bookmark so
user can choose a name that does not conflict. Otherwise some generic
enumeration, or prefix/suffix etc could be used; but I don't think it
would be needed if users is anyway giving it a name.

> and that when selecting a diredc bookmark you'd have to see all those
> other bookmarks which might make it more timeconsuming to find the
> bookmark you're after.
That is why we have completers like Helm. I never look at bookmarks. I
use Helm which completes them with a key or two. 
To be honest I don't use bookmarks much either; I have just few places
that would otherwise require me to navigate through path completion.

> For the first problem, I don't have a good solution.
We are asked for the bookmark name, so user choice?

> For the second, I think this actually hints at a need for the generic
> bookmark-selection functionality to offer a way to first select a *type*
> of bookmark and only then pick a name among the remaining candidates.
I think we already have that. Helm for example is one such.

> [ And of course, in the absence of such generic support in bookmark.el,
>   diredc could do it on its own by offer a command which pre-filters
>   the list of bookmarks to only include those which refer to
>   directories.  ]
Drew's Bookmark+ can bookmark pretty much anything. I never really found
use for it because I don't have such advanced needs, but it could
probably be used with diredc. I am affraid I am not the best person to
answer that, it is just my guess.

Pesonally I think that searching is much better than bookmarking since
search is cognitively less demanding (I'm getting old :-)). In principle
I use bookmarks just as a shortcuts for some long paths, and I search
those bookmarks with Helm.  Bookmarks are one way of indexing things
for searching.

For that reason I wouldn't see it as a downside to mix all "kind" of
bookmarks. A fuzzy search in a completion does not care much where data
comes from; for ex in helm-mini I can fuzzy complete recentf list,
bookmarks and list of live buffers all lumped into one source.

It is subjective of course. I understand your consideration and the way
you think as well as Boruch's consideration.