Re: find-file change between emacs 21 and emacs 22

[Perry Smith]

On Nov 13, 2006, at 10:17 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

From: Perry Smith <pedz@easesoftware.com>

Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:22:46 -0600

In emacs 22, simply hitting return after the ^X-^F reads in the  

directory.  That confuses me a lot.  I'm simply not use to it.

Most people wanted this change.  You seem to be the first one to want

the old and confusing behavior.  It is confusing because re-reading

the file is not something an Emacs user would normally want.  Can you

tell why you need that?

If I'm writing quick scaffolding code, I get my Makefile to compile and then execute the program and capture various things in different output files.  I want to reload the output files to look at them.  Another example, (roughly the same situation) I'm mucking with my C++ code and checking the assembly output trying to find things that the compiler optimizes better than other things.  Again, the output is to foo.s (the assembly language).  I need to reload the file after each test.

I did not find it confusing.  I thought it was really brilliant to give me two nice things with only one key stroke difference: reload the file or do the dired.  As it is now, I can only do one of those.  (I haven't tried your suggestion yet.)

Is it possible to revert it back to what emacs 21 did -- maybe a  

customized option or some variable I can set?

Not really, but the NEWS entry that describes the change shows a

work-around:

  ** C-x C-f RET, typing nothing in the minibuffer, is no longer a special case.

  Since the default input is the current directory, this has the effect

  of specifying the current directory.  Normally that means to visit the

  directory with Dired.

  You can get the old behavior by typing C-x C-f M-n RET, which fetches

  the actual file name into the minibuffer.

Oh! thats just as good!  I'll have to re-teach my fingers but that shouldn't be a problem.

I looked in the NEWS before my post and did not find the entry you mention.  (I was searching for find-file.) I'll look again.

Thanks for your help.

Perry Smith

Ease Software, Inc.

pedz@easesoftware.com

http://www.easesoftware.com

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