Re: mc 4.7.0-pre1 marking directories with -/+/*

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Theodore Kilgore wrote:

> On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Paul Hartman wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have used mc for years and can't live without it. :)
> >
> > I recently updated to mc 4.7.0-pre1 so I can see what's new and the
> > first thing I noticed was now directories are marked as part of -/+/*
> > operations by default. For - and + there is a "Files Only" checkbox,
> > but I can find no such thing for *. I have three questions:
> >
> > 1) Can I make "Files Only" checkbox remember its setting?
> > 2) Is there a setting to toggle whether * marks dirs?
> > 3) Or maybe a global "Files Only" to make -/+/* behave like previous MC?
> >
> > I also realize it's a -pre1 so maybe the options related to this new
> > functionality simply don't exist (yet) or are not in the UI.
> >
> > I often use the Compare Directories function to compare files in two
> > directories, which marks the differences. In my case I actually want
> > to find the duplicates, so I would press * in one panel to invert the
> > selection and press F8 to delete the duplicate files... now it selects
> > the duplicates along with every subdirectory (since they were not
> > marked as part of the compare operation). It's not a big deal but if
> > there are many subdirectories it can take a while to un-mark them
> > (since there is no "Directories only" option in -/+ that I can find).
> >
> > If you need more info, or if I should create a ticket instead, please
> > let me know.
> >
> > Thanks for the great work!
>
> I have not yet tried any pre- version, but I have been running a recent SVN 
> tree version for a while, now. The switch from marking files with 
> Cntrl-Alt-Plus to marking files _and_ directories is something which seems to 
> have come in recently. I have also found this change to be annoying, 
> irritating, inconvenient, and, under some circumstances, positively dangerous 
> (think of someone who wants to delete files and not recursively to delete 
> subdirectories, for example, or who wants to move all files but not 
> recursively to move all subdirectories from an FTP site and discovers that 
> one has initiated a very different course of action and it is too late to 
> stop it!).
>
> I think it is natural that one might naturally want to mark files for some 
> purpose, and not sudirectories. Why change a thing like that?
>
> Theodore Kilgore
>
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> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc

Sorry, correcting my previous post. I meant of course the Keypad-Plus key, 
not Cntrl-Alt-Plus. I suspect the reason is I have Cntrl-Alt-Plus on the 
brain. Another example of

change-for-the-sake-of-change-and-no-other-good-reason

which I have had to deal with recently is that the latest version of the X 
server seems to have disabled resolution changing with the Cntrl-Alt-Plus 
combination, at least for my hardware. All I can add to this is a general 
complaint that it seems there is a recent spate "fixing" or "improving" 
features which worked well for 15 years or more and people were not only 
used to those features, but often even relying on them.

BTW, since I have not had time to test out the new release, have the 
recently introduced problems about F3 followed by search with F7 and with 
"/" been fixed? The way these things worked in the past:

1. You could search for two different things in a file, using F7 for one 
of the searches, and "/" for the other. For years upon end, this was not a 
problem. You could go right ahead and do that. Now, in the SVN version 
with which I am currently afflicted, if you start one of the searches, 
then start the other, the first search gets "fixed" so that it is 
searching for the second one, too! Example, one wishes to search for "foo" 
using F7 and then search for "bar" using "/" then the next time you use F7 
again it is now searching for "bar" too. This kind of thing is not an 
improvement of the search capabilities. It is a step backwards.

2. Search used to be persistent. If I had two or more files in a 
directory, and I wanted to search for something, I could open one of the 
files and search for it. Then I could open the other file, hit F7 or "/" 
(whichever one I had used before) and the default was to search for that 
which I had previously searched, while having opened the first file. Now I 
have to re-type or mouse-copy what is to be searched because when I open 
the second file the contents of the search have been vaporized. This is 
not an improvement. It is a step backwards which breaks something which 
was well functioning.

I understand that the newest release has done some serious improvements, 
such as making easy the indentation of blocks in the internal editor, that 
kind of thing. That is nice, and I would like to test those things. But 
because of the problems I have just described, I have been afraid to test 
the newest release, worried about what I am about to discover next.

Theodore Kilgore