Re: Why @#! is not Emacs using the Recycle bin on w32?

[Johannes Weiner]

Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> Johannes Weiner wrote:
>> It's called `delete' not `move to somewhere else'.
>>   
>
> There's your problem, right there.  To many people,
> "delete" *means* "move to the trash area" and
> "empty trash" means "utterly discard the contents of the
> trash".

Probably to very few Emacs users.

> Early on, when people first started making UIs,
> there was a lot of discussion about confirmation
> dialogs.   For example, some naive systems would
> ask, for every file deleted, "Do you really want to
> delete this?"  And as people studied UIs they realized
> that such a question, repeated too often, looses all
> meaning.   So they invented trash areas ("trash cans,"
> "recycling bins," etc.).  The user can then batch a whole
> bunch of deletes at once, no confirmation needed -- but
> actually recovering the disk space and/or otherwise making
> the deleted file truly gone is a separate operation entirely.
>
> It's a linguistic confusion between communities, in part.
> The other part is that the linguistic community that
> takes "delete" to mean "move to trash" -- really has little
> or no use for a "delete" command in the Emacs sense and
> so is easily unpleasantly surprised when they accidentally
> invoke such a command.  "Why would the computer ever
> do *that*?!?"

First of all, you don't do that by accident.  You mark the files first
and delete in batch afterwards.

Secondly, dired's interface resembles the output of an old unix command,
so I expect all operations on the listed files to be done in the same
flavor.  And the documentation right now even tells me that it behaves
like `rm'!

Changing that would be like teaching `rm' about a trash can.

So if you do see a representation of files that seems alien to you, read
in the documentation of a program `rm' that doesn't tell you anything
and *then go ahead and throw into it your precious files with the
expectation that the interface would behave like all other stuff you
know while everything else of the program seems different and while
knowing in advance that you will later need these files again*...

Come on!

        Hannes