bug#10191: dired-query (in dired-aux.el) fails for certain help-char's, Emacs 23 and 24

[Christopher Genovese]

Hi Andreas,

    I understand that and tried to specifically address that point in my report. 
But I could have been clearer.

    I think that a change in this regard, even the minimal one I proposed, is 

worthwhile for at least two reasons. First, because setting help-char to ?\M-\C-h works 
in terms of its main functionality (acting as a help character), it seems unnecessary for 
it to break a dired operation because of the formatting of a string. Second, if the function

is going to be doctrinaire about help-char's type, then it has an obligation, I think, to recognize
that not everyone uses a help "char" and might use help-event-list instead. It should
then still do a characterp to avoid an error in those cases, possibly using the car of

help-event-list for the error message when the characterp call returns false.  
This is not that different from my proposed change, and I'd be happy with that.

     On the broader question, I would also argue that help-char should be "help-event"

or "help-keyboard-event".  This is an example of one of the things in emacs that are
IMHO too closely tied to the default keymap.  I set C-h to delete-backward-char,
M-h to backward-kill-word, and C-M-h to help char. This is a quite efficient arrangement

and should not cause breakage in simple services just because it deviates from
the default. This is Emacs after all. (Also, from the naive user's viewpoint, there
is not that much difference between specifying ?\M-\C-h and ?\C-h.  They both *look*

like characters.)

    -- Chris

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 03:36, Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

Christopher Genovese <genovese.cr@gmail.com> writes:

> For example, I set my help-char to ?\M-\C-h, which works fine in general.
> But despite looking like a character, ?\M-\C-h does not satisfy
> #'characterp, which causes
> the problem. Technically perhaps, help-char should be a character but from
> the user's point
> of view, both of these should qualify.

?\M-\C-h isn't a character, it is a character with modifiers, and as
such does not qualify.  A character is something which can be inserted
in a buffer or string as-is, for example.

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
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