Re: MC topdir /.. remove!

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> I want to reply to Bulia, Nerijus and Dmitry in one Reply to not
> overwhelm the Mailinglist.

Thanks.  I think that Bulia is not subscribed, so I'm adding him back to
the CC.

> First of all a filemanager should be a mirror of what the real
> filesystem gives you. My opinion. If you grab a good book describing how
> a filesystem is build up and what these '.' thingies mean then you
> understand it and that's the point what I was trying to explain.

You are better off learning the filesystem with "ls".  As for mc,
usability is more important than the exact representation of minor
technical details, especially considering the fact that mc also supports
virtual filesystems that don't actually have "." and ".." (e.g. tar
archives).

It's important that the users who come from other similar filemanagers are
not confused.  In all of those filemanagers, the root directory has no
"..", and it's an indicator of the top-level directory.

We could remove ".." everywhere and use a shortcut to go up (Ctrl-PgUp),
but that would also be confusing to the new users with DOS, Windows or
OS/2 background.

> Normally a dir has '.' for refresh, '..' for going back one dir and the
> root dir only has '.' for refresh.

'.' is not for refresh.  This entry is useful as the path for the current
directory when the path must be not-empty, e.g. when invoking commands:
"./configure".  It is also useful for commands like "ls -ald ."

> Now MC has the '.' removed and uses the '..' for going back one dir only
> and I got used to it over the years but the '..' in the root dir should
> become a '.' only and do a refresh of that dir ? Maybe optionally in a
> prefs ?

I'd like to avoid more options unless there is a major disagreement in
what users want.  I'd rather restore the old behavior because I don't
really care, but your arguments are not convincing.  Even pressing Space
and Enter would give you refresh on the empty command line, and you have
to have the empty command line to press Enter on ".."

> > Third, why not just press ctrl-r. Works in any place, and you don't
> > need to move cursor anywhere or go to any other dir. More importantly,
> > the ctrl-r feature was DESIGNED to do refresh. Why not use proper
> > tools for each task?

> Thats only a suggestion in how to do it differently but not the solution
> and answer to the open problem of the '.' dot thingies. I simply got
> used as righthand person to press ScreenUP and RETURN its faster and
> less of a distance for me to press these keys.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument because I changed one of the
default colors (dhotnormal from yellow on lightgray to blue on lightgray)
to make it more compatible with my chromatic vision.

However, being a lefthand person and having 6 years of mc experience, I
had no problem to learn Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown (right Ctrl!) when they
finally started working in the editor.

> Someone dunno who it was replied that I make some mistakes when I
> constantly delete stuff in rootdir... It was just an example nothing
> else.

Not at all.  You need to be root to change the contents of the root
directory (whether it's deleting or adding something).  And there is not
much to change there.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin