Package: emacs;
Reported by: Kévin Le Gouguec <kevin.legouguec <at> gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 18:03:02 UTC
Severity: normal
Tags: fixed, moreinfo, patch
Merged with 28969
Found in version 27.0.50
Fixed in version 28.1
Done: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
View this message in rfc822 format
From: Kévin Le Gouguec <kevin.legouguec <at> gmail.com> To: 35564 <at> debbugs.gnu.org Subject: bug#35564: 27.0.50; [PATCH] Tweak dired-do-shell-command warning about "wildcard" characters Date: Sat, 04 May 2019 20:01:52 +0200
[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]
Hello,
The function dired-do-shell-command checks the user's command for any
star or question mark not surrounded by whitespace or backquotes,
asking whether they are deliberate, since the character will then be
sent as-is to the shell, instead of being replaced with the marked
file(s).
A silly example:
- Open a Dired buffer
- M-! echo "Foobar." > foo RET
- g
- with point on foo:
- ! sed 's/\./?/' RET
The way the question is phrased bothers me:
> Confirm--do you mean to use `?' as a wildcard?
The first time I met this prompt was when I included a quoted '?' in
my command as in the example above, so I definitely did *not* mean to
use '?' as a shell wildcard.
Even now, knowing what the question really means, it still trips my
brain that I must answer "yes" (as in, "yes, I know Dired will not
substitute the marked files") when I mean "no" (as in, "no, I don't
mean to use '?' as a wildcard, what is this even ab- oh wait no right
I meant yes! Yes! 🤦").
I can think of a few ways to solve this:
1. Rephrase the question to be more general, specifically without
calling the characters "wildcards"; for example:
> Confirm--do you mean to send `?' to the shell without substitution?
2. Parse the command to find out whether the shell will actually use
these characters as wildcards.
- not sure how portable this would be across different shells
- AFAICT the aim of this prompt is simply to warn the user that
Dired will not expand these characters; whether the shell will
process them as wildcards is irrelevant
3. Add an option to skip this question (more of a workaround than a
solution).
Favoring option #1, I tried to find alternative questions, but none of
the ones I came up with sounded satisfying (most of them included some
form of double-negation, which is not the kind of puzzle I want to
solve when I'm about to run a hastily-put-together Bash oneliner).
I played around with the idea of actually *showing* the
"unsubstituted" characters to the user in order to be able to say
something like…
> Confirm--the highlighted characters will not be substituted.
> Proceed?
… and ended up with the attached patch, which I am not entirely
satisfied with (for one, it replaces `y-or-n-p' with `yes-or-no-p'
merely because the former seems to strip my prompt's text attributes
somehow[1]).
[0001-Make-dired-do-shell-command-highlight-unsubstituted-.patch (text/x-diff, attachment)]
[Message part 3 (text/plain, inline)]
WDYT? Assuming that Dired calling unsubstituted characters "wildcards" is indeed a problem, - can someone come up with a better phrasing? - is the highlighting, as implemented in this patch, helpful? - does anybody know why `y-or-n-p' prompts lose their face property? Thank you for your time. Kévin [1] Compare: (let ((prompt "foobar ")) (add-face-text-property 3 6 'warning nil prompt) (yes-or-no-p prompt)) With: (let ((prompt "foobar ")) (add-face-text-property 3 6 'warning nil prompt) (y-or-n-p prompt)) In GNU Emacs 27.0.50 (build 2, i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.11) of 2019-05-02 built on nc10-laptop Repository revision: 17a722982cca4e8e643c7a9102903e820e784cc6 Repository branch: master Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11902000 System Description: BunsenLabs GNU/Linux 9.8 (Helium) Recent messages: Mark saved where search started Mark set Mark saved where search started Mark set Making completion list... Quit [3 times] Mark set Quit [2 times] Type "q" in help window to restore its previous buffer, C-M-v to scroll help. Quit Quit Configured using: 'configure --with-xwidgets' Configured features: XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS GLIB NOTIFY INOTIFY ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE M17N_FLT LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 XDBE XIM THREADS XWIDGETS JSON PDUMPER LCMS2 GMP Important settings: value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: Emacs-Lisp Minor modes in effect: global-magit-file-mode: t magit-file-mode: t magit-auto-revert-mode: t auto-revert-mode: t global-git-commit-mode: t async-bytecomp-package-mode: t shell-dirtrack-mode: t show-paren-mode: t minibuffer-depth-indicate-mode: t icomplete-mode: t global-page-break-lines-mode: t page-break-lines-mode: t electric-pair-mode: t diff-hl-flydiff-mode: t global-diff-hl-mode: t diff-hl-mode: t delete-selection-mode: t tooltip-mode: t global-eldoc-mode: t eldoc-mode: t electric-indent-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t column-number-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t Load-path shadows: None found. 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