Re: address@hidden: Re: mouse-1-click-follows-link in diredsurprising]

[Miles Bader]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:
> 1) We should *not* highlight the links (except via mouseover). The links are
> known or predictable by virtue of the regularity of their positions.
> Highlighting the links in such a buffer hinders, it does not help,
> orientation and navigation.

I generally agree with Drew on this -- in very "link dense" buffers,
excessive highlighting can be more annoying than helpful.

In the case of dired, however, there is a slight problem (especially
with recent verions of GNU ls[*]) with visually separating the filename
from the file-info on the same line.  Perhaps it would be a good idea to
give the _other_ fields (date, etc) a slightly different face to
de-emphasize them a bit?

[*] Because of GNU ls's current "shrink to fit" behavior, unfortunately
most fields end up with only a single space separating them, which is
really not enough.  An alternative solution to de-emphasizing the
non-name info might be to post-process the ls output to at least insert
a bit more whitespace before the filename.


Here are some pics showing the the current dired appearance, and dired
with non-filename info de-emphasized:

[The face I used for de-emphasis in these pics is "grey80", which is
fairly conservative -- it's almost as bright as normal text -- but still
seems to make big difference in readability.]

normal.png
Description: Current dired appearance

de-emph.png
Description: Dired with non-filename info de-emphasized

-Miles

-- 
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