Re: current directory

[don provan]

vb <help-gnu-emacs@vsbe.com> writes:

> well, this is becoming a philosophical issue, but I'll comment on it
> anyways: as soon as somebody gets to decide what is good for other
> people, the other people are in trouble.

LOL! You obviously aren't very familiar with emacs! Emacs provides all
manner of options for adjusting anything to any behavior that's ever
been suggested by anyone for any reason. And then *on top of that* you
can implement any changes, improvements, or additions with a little
lisp code.

But the fact is that *something* has to be the default behavior, and
in this case, the per-buffer current directory is an outstanding
choice. The only reason it might give people some trouble is that more
trivial editors encourage you to invoke the editor one time for one
file, and then invoke it again for another file, etc., so that there's
a one-to-one correspondence between editor session and file. Emacs is
a development system, so most people use it to look at or modify many
files in any given session. (Some people go so far as to use a single
emacs sessions as their *entire user environment* and don't do
*anything* outside emacs!) In that situation, it would be *insane* to
insist that the user keep in mind some arbitrary "current directory"
based on how emacs was invoked the very first time when there's a very
specific and obvious directory location staring the user in the face.

> Again, I am all for emacs doing whatever whoever thinks is good. But
> let those who feel otherwise do what they want - otherwise this is
> like a communist society: driving people to their happiness with an
> iron fist.

Fight on, Dude!

> say I am editing a file which is longer than a few screenfulls. I
> hit the 'page up' key a few times, and then hit the 'page down' key
> the same number of times. I get back the screen there was
> originally, but the cursor now is in the first line, not where it
> was before these page scrolls.

I'm not sure what editor you're thinking of, but what the other
editors I'm familiar with do is leave the cursor on a page that you
aren't currently looking at, making it amusing and confusing when you
issue a command that actually depends on a cursor location that is not
long in view. While someone mentioned a workaround, really the problem
is that you aren't using the editor to accomplish what *you* want.
Isn't what you really want to do hold your place with a finger, go off
and look at something somewhere else, and then return to your finger?
Emacs provides "marks" to do exactly that, so you can return to
exactly the original spot with a single command rather than manually
returning the view back to the original location by remembering how
many pages you've moved up or down and issuing that many page movement
command to get back.

Or, to summarize, you seem to have been trained by simple editors and
developed techniques to deal with them because they're so stupid. You
might want to -- but I'm not forcing you! -- step back and think about
what *you* really want to do when you're editing, and I wonder if you
won't find that emacs provides a easy way to do *that* rather than an
way to continue jumping through the hoops that your old editor taught
you to jump through. You might find that the real bad guy here is your
old editor....

-don