Re: tlug: File Browsers

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Toshio Oda <craigoda@example.com> writes:

    Craig> Do you use dired?  I don't mind a steep learning curve if
    Craig> there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  I've been using
    Craig> dired on and off for a year, but never had a need for a
    Craig> file browser until recently.

No, I rarely use it; when I do, it's mostly for cleaning up a
directory by compressing old mail archives, deleting autobackups,
etc.  However after fighting with the TurboLinux scripts/configs for
diald/ppp, I'm ready for a file browser, I think.

    Craig> Now, I'm working with about 20 text files that I edit, a
    Craig> reference directory of plain text files, and 4 FTP archives
    Craig> that are all hot-keyed.  What I want to do is group files

Um, what's a hot-key do?  If you mean it jumps to that file, C-X C-B
will do that for you in [X]Emacs.  I've never needed it, but you can
definitely rebind the mouse to do `Buffer-menu-other-window'.  There
doesn't seem to be a way to do this with frames, but I'm not an
expert.  It probably wouldn't be too hard to code up, either.  To get
the buffer configuration to persist across Emacs sessions, use the
desktop library, which does session management.

    Craig> together that I'm currently working on so that if I press
    Craig> some hot-keys, it shows me the 2-3 files that are relevant.
    Craig> I like midnight commander because I can hot-key an FTP site
    Craig> either anonymous or with a username and password in the
    Craig> URL.  Dangerous, but convenient.  Are there ways to hot-key
    Craig> and group directories, files, and file-systems in dired?

You can choose to narrow the display using regexps, but I don't think
you can group them arbitrarily.  You wouldn't have hot keys, although
that would be easy enough to do using macros.  Dired and efs work
closely together; again, by creating macros you could easily get 
the effect of hot-keyed FTP sites.  By using named macros you could
get the effect of persistent hotkeys across Emacs sessions.

I'm not recommending this; however (if I had time) it wouldn't be very 
hard to hack something up to make it fairly easy to use in specialized 
circumstances.

    Craig> I've been using a bash shell inside of Emacs with links,
    Craig> pushd, popd, symbolic links and funky options to ls up
    Craig> until now.  However, this is starting to break down.  I'm
    Craig> pretty happy with midnight commander except for the fact
    Craig> that when I am over a file or URL, I can't just send it to
    Craig> an open session of Emacs/XEmacs.  This is the advantage of
    Craig> dired.  Or, is there a way to do this in midnight
    Craig> commander?

Dunno.  Try setting EDITOR=gnuclient (XEmacs) or EDITOR=emacsclient
(FSF's Emacs) in the shell.  Or you may need to do this in mc's
options configuration, wherever that is.

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