Re: [PATCH] Use vtable for eww-bookmarks

[Adam Porter]

> Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:
> > Given that, let's go with your implementation, though I do have one
> > last concern with the "undo sort": the keybinding ("u") is the same as
> > what other table-like modes (e.g. dired, list-packages) use for
> > "unmark". Currently we don't support marking/unmarking in the
> > bookmarks menu, but that seems like a useful thing we might add one
> > day: you could mark several bookmarks in order to open them all,
> > delete them all, add some kind of tag to them, etc.
>
> This is a good idea.
>
> > I'm not sure what a better key would be though. Maybe "C" for "clear sort"?
>
> Attached a patch that uses "c" ("c", not "C") and renames the function
> to match.
> Let me know what you think!

Given how many similar modes and buffers that are in Emacs (i.e. where 
some kind of objects are displayed in a list with metadata), I think it 
would be best if any new such feature followed existing paradigms as 
closely as possible.  To have each vtable-like view (whether implemented 
with vtable or tabulated-list or anything else) have slightly different 
concepts and bindings is not helpful to the user.

So I'd suggest a reconsideration of the concept of sorting: There is no 
such thing as "clearing" the sorting, because the entries are always 
sorted by something, even if that's just the order in which the 
bookmarks are present in the list (which is probably the order in which 
they were created, or the inverse).

As an example, consider Dired: there is no "clearing" of sorting options 
in Dired, but there is dired-sort-toggle-or-edit: it toggles between 
sorting by date and sorting by the default (i.e. alphabetically).

In this case, the vtable-map already binds 
vtable-sort-by-current-column.  So it seems like what we need is a 
column by which to sort entries by default.  That would seem to leave us 
with two options:

  a) Sort by bookmark name by default

  b) Add a column for the bookmarks' place in the list, and sort by 
that by default.

Then the user could simply sort by one column or the other, without 
needing to add the additional concept of "clearing" the sorting (a 
concept that's not generally present in such views in other GUIs, 
anyway--usually a table view is always sorted by one column or another).

And with that, the existing binding of vtable-sort-by-current-column 
would suffice, eliminating the need for another sort-related binding.

What do you think?  :)

BTW, instead of doing:

+    (while (not (equal (vtable-current-object)
+                       bookmark-at-point))
+      (forward-line 1))))

Could you use vtable-goto-object?  I realize that it currently uses EQ 
for comparison, but 1) we've talked about changing that, and 2) ISTM 
that EQ should work for this case anyway, because entries in the 
bookmark list are being compared, and they shouldn't be getting copied. 
Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Adam