Re: dired alignment

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Do you mean, using --dired should force the old-style alignment?
>> That might be a good partial solution.

> It was more a coreutils than an emacs comment.  It looks like the `ls`
> alignment changes were intended to make life easier for interactive
> users on a terminal console.  However those changes shouldn't have
> affected --dired output which is in effect a protocol to communicate
> with emacs dired mode.

>> However, we will still have problems with non-GNU versions of ls,
>> so we might want to make Dired fix the alignment when it doesn't
>> use --dired.

Note that the problem is more general than that.  If a group has a very
long name or a file is very large, alignment is lost in the output of old
GNU ls whereas it is preserved in the new.
I.e. the new alignment in GNU ls breaks alignment betwen different
invocations of `ls' but fixes alignment within a single invocation of `ls'.
And you can't have it both ways.

> That's another problem, though perhaps dired.el should always work with
> 'ls -l --dired' output, and that for non-GNU versions of ls, a layer of
> elisp filters be added to convert to produce the dired output.

IIRC, the --dired flag only indicates whre the file names start/end,
which doesn't help much for alignment of other fields.


        Stefan