Subject: bug#44273: "total used in directory 19 available 5.2 GiB"

From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2020 12:53:02 -0800 (PST)

> >> And maybe also show the number of marked/flagged files,
> >> updated on every marking/unmarking.
> >
> > IMO, that's better done in the mode line, which is what
> > Dired+ does.
> >
> > The "total" line we're talking about, for each subdir
> > listing, shows the # of visible files for that subdir
> > listing and the total # of files in the top-level dir
> > of the buffer.
> >
> > The mode line shows Dired/date or Dired/name, and the
> > # of marks (*) and # of flags (D).  And it shows the
> > ordinal # of the file or dir on the current line (point),
> > with the current sorting, as well as the total number of
> > files/dirs for that subdir listing.
> 
> Another variant is that marking/unmarking commands could show
> a message in the echo area with statistics of marked/flagged files
> with total sizes of all marked/flagged files.

IMO that would constitute unnecessary noise.

That would be the case even if it just said part of that.
But it would be especially noisy to include not only mark
and flag tallies but also file sizes.

We echo the result of an actual action (e.g. "Copy: 1 file").
I don't think it would be a good idea to echo (un)marking
or (un)flagging actions.

In any case, that would not substitute for having a tally
of marks and flags shown constantly, which you can refer
to at any time.