[svlug] About mc (and other linux file managers)

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 14:05:25 -0800 
Joe Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
> J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu> wrote:

>>> I'm trying to figure out why "dired" isn't in the running here.

>> It kinda is and mostly isn't.  The main reason its not is that
>> I'm not in XEmacs when I have an interest in file management, I'm
>> in a bash shell and I've little/no interest in running gnuclient
>> at that point just to bring up an XEmacs for a few seconds.

> And you don't want to bend your principles and run GNU emacs? 

I spent a couple hours last year ripping out all the GNU Emacs
compatibility stuff from my .xemacs as it was getting to be too much
of a pain to maintain and I didn't remember most of the deltas
anyway.  No interest in going back.

> Either 'emacs -nw .' or 'emacs-nox .'...

You can do the same thing under XEmacs.

> ... would probably be my first thought (adding a dot to the
> command line will kick you straight into dired, editing the
> current directory).

Ditto under XEmacs.  Extra ditto for gnuclient ala gnuclient -nw. etc.

> It's one of the advantages of GNU emacs over XEmacs: you can run
> it over a dialup shell.

You can run XEmacs under a TTY as well and have been able to from
day one.  It is not and never has been an advantage for GNU Emacs.

> I know the usual complaint is the start-up time, but these days it
> just doesn't seem that long to me.

Startup time for a new XEmacs process here (dual PIII-500, 512MB
RAM) is 23 seconds.  This is mostly explained by:

  $ wc -l ~/.xemacs/* | f total
  18983 total

Then again, my typical runtime for an XEmacs instance is small order
months.

> Another thing I was thinking about is the stand-alone version of
> dired, but the situation there is a little more complicated than I
> remembered, according to this Linux Gazette article:

Aye, I might look that way, tho currently its more tempting to hack
John Crowe's list.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.