Re: [h-e-w] dired formating inconsistent

[Jason Rumney]

Sarir Khamsi <address@hidden> writes:

> After using Emacs 21.3.50.1 for a bit, I've noticed that the output of
> dired does not seem to be consistent: sometimes the listing of the
> filenames does not align correctly. Unfortunately, I can't seem to
> determine what conditions cause this (eg. certain directories,
> filenames, phase of the moon, etc). Has anyone seen this and have a
> solution? Thanks.

The problem is the version of ls you are using. A recent version of
GNU ls was changed to vary the column widths based on the length of
filenames being listed, instead of having fixed columns. Because Emacs
updates the dired buffer with partial directory listings after some
operations, the column widths can get out of step with such a version
of ls. We have asked the ls developers to give us some way to get
fixed width columns, but I do not know what happened to that.