Re: Shell completion on w32 uses "/" instead of "\"

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:39:31 +0100
> From: Lennart Borgman <address@hidden>
> CC:  address@hidden
> 
> Can you please explain more exactly what problems you see with my patch? 

Backslashes are generally a problem in Emacs, because of their Lisp
interpretation.  I don't want us to introduce such a danger before the
release.  This problem was with us for a long time, way before Emacs
22, so I don't think anything will happen if we suffer from it for one
more release.

> It autocompletes in the shell buffer with "\" if the shell used has 
> w32-shell-dos-semantics. When do you not want this?

Personally, I _never_ want to see backslashes, even when I work in
CMD.  It makes me saner, since I happen to work simultaneously on Unix
and on Windows.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.

> >>         C:\myecvs> dir bld/emacs<RET>
> >>         dir bld/emacs
> >>         Invalid switch - "emacs".
> >>     
> >
> > That's a different problem, because I could type the full command
> > "dir foo/bar" without using auto-completion, and it would still fail.
> > It could be solved in cmdproxy, for example.  If you have time to work
> > on this, please do.
> 
> There is no need to do it on that level AFAICS

cmdproxy is IMO the _only_ level where this should be done, because we
are talking about rewriting commands typed by the user, to make them
palatable to the Windows shells -- _precisely_ the job for which
cmdproxy was invented.  Doing this on any other level would need
introduction of too much knowledge of the shell semantics into places
which don't want to know about that.  By contrast, cmdproxy already
knows about shell semantics, and is meant to deal with that.