Re: Improvement Suggestion: Faces in Buffer Menu (patch included)

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Colin Walters wrote:

> Any comments are appreciated!

A few minor ones:

If this is included in Emacs, I think "M-x ibuffer RET" should
autoload the package.  If so, then these instructions:

> ;; Place this file somewhere in your `load-path', and add:
> 
> ;; (require 'ibuffer)
> 
> ;; to your ~/.emacs file.  After that, you should be able to type 'M-x
> ;; ibuffer' to get started.  'h' will give a brief usage description.

will have to change.

Menu items (and there are lots of them ;-) would probably benefit from
help text, given that there's no user manual.

A short notice of the package existence should go into NEWS and
probably into the user manual as well.  A separate user manual would
be even nicer; I think a package of this magnitude deserves one.

> (require 'easymenu)
> (require 'derived)
> (require 'font-lock)
> ;; Needed for Emacs 20
> (unless (fboundp 'popup-menu)
>   (require 'lmenu))

Are all of these really needed at run time, not just at compile time?

>  ;; Emacs 20 or less
>  (t
>   (defun ibuffer-replace-in-string (regexp rep string)
>     "Replace all matches for TEXT with REP in STRING.
> This function was modified from the Emacs 21 sources: which see for
> the original source and full documentation."

Isn't it better to repeat the documentation here?  You can't expect a
user of Emacs 20 to look for anything in the Emacs 21 distro she
doesn't have, can you?

IMHO, ibuffer uses up too much of the menu-bar's real estate (6
top-level entries!).  I suggest to put some of these into submenus.
For example, Regexp could be a submenu of Mark; Immediate, Sort, and
Limit could be parts/submenus of a single top-level item called, e.g.,
View or Display (they all pertain to how buffers are displayed).  That
would leave you with 3 top-level items instead of 6.

Mouse-2 on the buffer name switches to that buffer, but the help text
which pops up in a tooltip doesn't say that.  It is my experience that
many users don't know about Mouse-2's normal action, so I think we
should make a point of mentioning that in the help text.

Mouse-2 on the mode name limits the display to that mode, but Mouse-2
on the size doesn't have a corresponding limiting effect.  Shouldn't
it?

I was confused by the `l' (ibuffer-redisplay) command: why is it
needed?  My confusion happened because I visited a few files and
wanted to see them in the *Ibuffer* buffer.  That doesn't happen
automatically (shouldn't it?), so I looked for an option to refresh
the display.  "Redisplay" seemed appropriate, but it had no effect.
Only later did I see "Update", which did what I wanted.  Since there's
no help text, I could only guess what does Redisplay do (its doc
string doesn't help ;-).  Perhaps "Update" should be renamed into
"Refresh" or something.

HTH