Re: On improving Bookmarks

[Karl Fogel]

[I'm combining the original bug-59212 thread with an emacs-devel 
thread here.]

On 12 Nov 2022, Eli Zaretskii wrote in Bug #59212: 
> > From: Gabriel <gabriel376@hotmail.com>
> > Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2022 05:56:22 -0300
> >
> > Description:
> > Not a bug per se, but a suggestion for improvement in how 
> > Bookmark
> > displays the Type (added by commit 
> > 7c995264359824cc1aca40ca37201db5ed44e659).
> >
> > Currently, bookmark-bmenu-list (C-x r l) displays a column 
> > named Type,
> > which has a proper value for all handlers (e.g.: Eshell, VC, 
> > EWW etc)
> > except for regular files, in which an empty string is 
> > displayed. I
> > believe the current behavior could be improved by displaying a 
> > default
> > value ("Files") to make the interface more uniform, explicit 
> > and to
> > avoid confusion.
> >
> > Steps:
> > 1) emacs -Q
> > 2) M-x eshell
> > 3) C-x r m <RET>
> > 4) C-x C-f ~/foo.bar
> > 5) C-x r m <RET>
> > 6) C-x r b
> >
> > These steps will add two bookmarks (eshell and foo.bar) and 
> > will open
> > the Bookmarks list. The Type column will have values "" and
> > "Eshell". After the patch below is applied, the Type column 
> > will have
> > values "File" and "Eshell".
>
> Thanks.
>
> Karl, any comments?

I don't have a strong opinion on this UI suggestion.

For users who set mostly file-or-directory bookmarks, and don't 
set very many bookmarks of other types, then it probably makes 
sense to treat files/directories as the default and not show a 
type for them.  That way, the unusual bookmarks stand out (which 
is useful because they might have different response-time 
characteristics, or other interactive idiosyncracies, than that 
user's typical bookmark does).

On the other hand, for users for whom file/directory bookmarks are 
not more common than other kinds of bookmarks, showing "File" or 
"Directory" like any other type would probably be better.  Those 
users are already accustomed to a variety of interactivity 
characteristics from their bookmarks anyway, so it makes less 
sense to trade away consistency of display in favor of stand-out 
visibility of certain cases.

But these are really minor differences; they're not terribly 
persuasive either way.  I think I'm still at "no strong opinion". 
I wouldn't stand in the way of the change.

Continuing on to the later conversation on emacs-devel about this:

On 16 Nov 2022, Gabriel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think there are some opportunities for improvements in 
> Bookmarks (in
> general and in how it support Types) and would like to collect 
> general
> feedback and directions before reporting bugs or proposing 
> patches,
> especially considering if such changes would be useful, the 
> effort to
> implement them and how to handle compatibility.
>
> Bookmarks has support for Types besides regular "Files" or 
> "Directories"
> (opened with Dired).  A quick xref in current Emacs master branch 
> shows
> the following Types:
>
> - "DocView"
> - "Eshell"
> - "Gnus"
> - "Help"
> - "Image-Dired"
> - "Info"
> - "Man"
> - "EWW"
> - "VC"
> - "WoMan"
>
> 1) The empty "Type" column on C-x r l (bookmark-bmenu-list)
>
> Bookmarks shows a proper value in the Type column of 
> bookmark-bmenu-list
> for all Types, except for regular "Files" and "Directories", in 
> which
> shows an empty string.  I believe that displaying the actual Type 
> rather
> an empty string for these cases would make the interface more 
> consistent
> and easier for navigation.  See bug#59212 for the open 
> discussion.
> Besides the question regarding the real value of this change, I
> currently don't know how to easily distinguish between "Files" 
> and
> "Directories" without relying on IO calls 
> (e.g. file-directory-p), which
> could degrade performance in case of long Bookmarks lists.  We 
> could
> display the string "File" for both "Files" and "Directories", but 
> it
> would be a worse experience for users to not provide such 
> distinction.

Could we just use a combined term like "File/Dir" or "File/Path" 
or just "Path" or something?  Not the perfect user experience, but 
an 80% solution.  Obviously, we'd want to keep the width small.

> 2) The usage of "File" and "Filename" in docs and interface
>
> In docs (e.g. (info "(emacs)Bookmarks")) and interface (e.g. the 
> "File"
> column in bookmark-bmenu-list), we can find several occurrences 
> of the
> terms "File" and "Filename" (and related terms), which I think is
> inconsistent since Bookmarks supports Types that do not really 
> have
> these concepts (e.g. "Help", "Man", "EWW", "Gnus").  A better 
> term would
> be "Location", which is already used in some places
> (e.g. bookmark-location, bookmark-relocate, the 'location 
> property).
> Thus, I propose to make "Location" the official term in docs, 
> interface
> and code, and to obsolete "File", "Filename" and related ones.

+1.  This makes a lot of sense, independently of whatever we do in 
the Type column of the Bookmark Menu.

The rest of your post on emacs-devel isn't really related to bug 
#59212, so I'll follow up separately to it in a moment.

Best regards,
-Karl