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

[Colin Walters]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Colin Walters wrote:
>
>> Any comments are appreciated!
>
> A few minor ones:

Thank you for your comments.  Richard sent me quite a number today as
well.  I have addressed most of these issues in the current CVS, which
is in a state of disarray at the moment as I work on fixing all the
things Richard pointed out.  However, it's available at:

<URL:http://cvs.verbum.org/ibuffer/>

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

[...]

> will have to change.

Ok.

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

Done.

> 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.

Ok.  Before working on a real manual or even a node in the Emacs
manual, I'd like to hash out a few important user-interface details
here.  I'll bring them up before it is installed.

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

I don't think they were.  This should be addressed in the current CVS.

> 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?

Most of this stuff has been put into ibuf-compat.el.  Hopefully people
won't be depending on the various functions in there anyways.

> 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.

I've moved the Regexp menu into Mark.  Immediate however does not
contain solely display-replated items; right now there is "Diff with
file" and "Customize".  Like much of Ibuffer, the menus are modeled
from Dired's menus.  Dired actually uses 5 top-level menu items as
well.  I suppose I could move Sort into Immediate, but since there is
precendent for 5 entries I am hesistant to do this.

And combining both Sort and Limit into one menu would make for either
an enormous menu (the current Limit menu alone is big), or a very
tiny menu with both Sort and Limit as submenus.  Neither option
sounds especially appealing.  However, I admit I am not well versed
in UI issues, and if you (or someone else) has a strong opinion on
the way this should be I am more than willing to do it.

> 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.

I thought the version I posted had a help-echo for this.  Anyways,
the current CVS does.

> 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?

How would it work?  Should it limit by size greater than, less than,
or equal to that buffer's size?

> I was confused by the `l' (ibuffer-redisplay) command: why is it
> needed?  

Well, Dired has this as well.  You can kill some lines in Dired with
'k', but not delete the associated files.  Then, typing 'l' refreshes
the display of the current list.  Ibuffer does the analogous thing for
buffers.

Now that I think about it though, I doubt most Ibuffer users are aware
of, or use, this feature, since it is more or less superceded by
Ibuffer's "limits" feature.  So I've now stopped advertising it in the
menus, but it is still there for the people whose fingers are wired
for Dired.

> 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?)

Did you call M-x ibuffer (or one of the other access functions) again?
That should have regenerated the buffer list, unless you modified the
default value of `ibuffer-update-policy'.  If you want an Ibuffer
buffer to be updated any time a buffer is created or killed, try 'M-x
ibuffer-auto-mode'.

> 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 ;-).

The docstring does say "the current list of buffers", but I admit this
is probably one of those things that only makes sense after you know
what it means...

Thanks for your comments, Eli.