Re: tags-loop-continue

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 01/20/2016 02:19 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

(I'll get to the performance issues later.)

> With 'Q' (dired-find-regexp-and-replace) losing *xref* is a lot
> easier: as you walk through the matches, the window which displayed
> *xref* suddenly switches to display one of the files with matches
> instead of showing *xref*.  I think that window should not be reused
> for showing matches (perhaps through some display-buffer magic).

I never thought that the *xref* buffer is important for 
dired-find-regexp-and-replace, and even considered creating a modified 
version of xref-query-replace that wouldn't require that buffer. But 
indeed, it seems important for continuing the replace operation.

> Even worse, there seems to be no way of continuing with the
> query-replace operation once it is interrupted for some reason.  It
> happened to me when I tried to resize the window (because I wanted to
> see less of the *xref* buffer) -- Emacs exited the query-replace
> command, and I couldn't find a way to continue it where I left off,
> even after switching to the *xref* buffer.  I think there should be a
> way, perhaps with '.' and/or RET, to continue the query-replace from
> the match on the current line in *xref*, otherwise people will
> complain.

I think we can do something like this: as the user agrees to 
replacements, we disable/mark/hide corresponding entries in the xref buffer.

So if the user aborts the replace process, the *xref* buffer only 
contains the entries they haven't gotten around to. (Or the skipped ones 
too? That might be harder to implement).

Then, pressing `r' again will continue where they left off.

> I wouldn't obsolete them just yet.  We may wish letting users who will
> be unhappy with the new UI to have a way to get the old behavior back,
> until the new UI is improved enough to satisfy users.  But we can
> certainly document the new commands instead of the old ones in the
> manual.

We've obsoleted find-tag and friends, though. Is that really a problem?