Re: [Patch] Behavior of dired when there already is a dired buffer of the same directory

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Antoine Levitt wrote:
> Hi,
> If I have a dired open on x, do external modifications on the structure
> of x, and rerun dired on x, emacs currently advises me to press g to
> revert the buffer. This is inefficient, and I'd much rather be offered
> to revert by a y/n prompt. The relevant function includes the commentary :
> ;; A pity we can't possibly do "Directory has changed - refresh? "
> ;; like find-file does.
> cvs annotate attributes this to Richard Stallman, in 1992. I didn't find
> the reason why that was impossible. I contribute this patch in the hope
> that this comment was motivated by technical difficulties that no longer
> exist. It creates a new setting, dired-refresh-modified-dirs, which
> controls the behavior, and defaults to ask the user by y-or-no-p.
> I tested it, and found no flaws. I am still not sure about a few points,
> notably switches : whether to reset the switches after a new invocation
> of dired, for instance.
> I have not much experience in elisp, much less in dired, but I still
> hope this patch to be relevant. If it's not, feel free to disregard it.
> Antoine Levitt


I see no reason why the default should not be that the dired buffers are
just refreshed (with an idle timer and a hook if the user tries to use
them first).