Re: Word boundaries in wdired mode

[Henrik Enberg]

martin rudalics <address@hidden> writes:
> > There's something screwy about word boundries in wdired mode.  Say I
> > have the following files in a directory:
> >
> > FOO.EXT
> > BAR.EXT
> > BAZ.EXT
> >
> > If I try to downcase them by placing point on F and hitting "M-l" a
> > number of times, then I end up with this:
> >
> > foo.ext
> > BAR.ext
> > BAZ.ext
> >
> > The first two M-l work as expected, but the next two skips over BAR and
> > BAZ respectively.
> 
> The patch below should work around this but the bug is inherently with
> `operate_on_word': When you have a buffer line like
> 
>  FOO.TXT
> 
> with point-at-bol and the space before FOO is read-only, `downcase-word'
> will fail to downcase FOO even if it's not read-only.
> 
> In principle, `operate_on_word' should skip any non-word syntax first
> before attempting to downcase the following word.  Unfortunately, Emacs
> misses a cheap `forward-nonword' primitive, (skip-syntax-forward "^w")
> is a poor substitute.
> 
> *** wdired.el.~1.22.~ Sat Dec  9 22:30:12 2006
> --- wdired.el Fri Jan  5 18:22:44 2007
> ***************
> *** 576,583 ****
>               (funcall command 1)
>               (setq arg (1- arg)))
>           (error
> !          (if (not (forward-word 1))
> !              (setq arg 0)))))))
> 
>   (defun wdired-downcase-word (arg)
>     "WDired version of `downcase-word'.
> --- 576,584 ----
>               (funcall command 1)
>               (setq arg (1- arg)))
>           (error
> !          (if (forward-word)
> !          (skip-syntax-forward "^w")
> !        (setq arg 0)))))))
> 
>   (defun wdired-downcase-word (arg)
>     "WDired version of `downcase-word'.

This does indeed fix it.  I suggest it be installed even if it's
somewhat suboptimal.