[h-e-w] Re: [Emacs:dired-sort-menu] A Suggestion

[Dr Francis J. Wright]

Sergej Malinovski wrote:
> 
> I've just tried your dired-sort-menu package thinking it could provide
> me some sorting capabilities that make file management a little easier
> that dired[-x] doesn't. As it turns out, it doesn't. That's why the
> suggestion.
> 
> I'd like the buffer sorted by name with first directories (including
> linked), then other files (including linked), but without ignoring "."
> (the dot) at the beginning of filenames. Here's an example:
> 
>   drwxrwxr-x   55 sergej   sergej       2918 Sep 28 00:41 .
>   drwxrwsr-x    5 root     staff         100 Jun 11 19:26 ..
>   drwxr-xr-x    2 sergej   sergej       1871 Sep 28 00:39 .backup
>   drwx------    2 sergej   sergej        146 Jun 13 14:44 .cedit
>   drwxr-xr-x    5 sergej   sergej        213 Sep 24 02:39 .eboard
>   drwxr-xr-x    2 sergej   sergej        187 Sep 24 21:48 bin
>   lrwxrwxrwx    1 sergej   sergej         17 Jan 28  2001 dreamer -> 
> /mnt/vfat/dreamer
>   drwxr-xr-x    5 sergej   sergej       1140 Sep 28 00:38 elisp
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej       1643 Sep 10 15:39 .bashrc
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej      34406 Jul  9 14:45 .complete
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej         50 Sep 27 21:26 .emacs
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej          1 Sep 28 01:00 blabla
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej      31603 Sep 24 02:18 
> patch-rml-2.4.10-preempt-kernel-1
>   -rw-r--r--    1 sergej   sergej       1561 Sep 24 02:18 
> patch-rml-2.4.10-preempt-ptrace-and-jobs-fix-2
> 
> Other variations on this theme would also be nice. I'm not sure if it
> is possible to do... but if you hack something together, I'll be very
> grateful :-)

I'm not quite clear in what way dired-sort-menu currently does not give
what you want.  If you select sort by name and dirs first then don't you
get the above?  It works for me.  Display of directories starting with .
should not be affected and is controlled by the value of the
customizable user option 
"Dired Listing Switches", which I have set to -alt so that, by default,
directories are sorted by time modified.  If you replace a by A you will
get . filenames EXCEPT . and ..; if you have neither then you will not
see any . filenames.  This is all standard ls behaviour, which is also
emulated by ls-lisp (but various dired-sort-menu options like dirs first
and ignore case only work with ls-lisp).

Handling links (on Windows) and some other options requires my version
of ls-lisp, which I was assuming, and if they are cygwin links then
support must be turned on explicitly via customization (because parsing
them is slow).  [I have not checked recently whether that all still
works with the current cygwin!]

Does that solve the problem?  If not, do please let me know.

I'll consider adding menu control over . filenames.

Francis