Stefan Kangas writes: > Arthur Miller writes: > >> Another question: can I assume, at this time of civilisation >> development, that everybody has GNU ls, since binutils, or coreutils, or >> what is the name, is probably default on most *nix distros, as well as >> on msys2 which is needed to build on Windows. No idea how Mac people are >> doing in that regard though? > > MacOS has BSD userland, as does *BSD. > > You can install it and use GNU coreutils optionally, but I would expect > only a minority of users to do that. > > Best regards, > Stefan Kangas Alright, thanks. I can then either opt for status quo, as it is now (just date and name) or add extra sort options and bool flag in defcustom for users to enable if they now they have gnu ls. I could also add utility funciton to print version of ls in say message buffer. Anyway I have red the manual about propertize and seen some examples in code that Eli pointed me to, online aw well, and as I understand this feature (help-echo) is fairly trivial and easy to use. I like it, it seems really usefull. However, for some reason modeline ignores my propertized string :-). Below is another sketch for this. Instead of displaying actual switches, I display string "by user". I tested with elipsis at the end, "by user...", but I don't think it lookes so nice on modeline. The strategy is to show the tooltip with switches when user hoovers with pointer over the modeline (I completely missed that feature of Emacs since I use mouse and modeline so little :-)). Attached is a patch with this sketch, the only problem seems that I missundestand something, seems modeline does not display the tooltip. I am sorry for me being such noob, I will look around more, but if somebody can point out the misstake it will be helpful.