lots

[steve@gec-epl.co.uk (Steve_Kilbane)]

[ bit of a mixed bag this one, folks. sorry. saves on the mail. ]

Paul:
> after all, emacs is useful for some things.
Anthony L. Kimball:
> This should get a catcall or two:  history could go.  (That's what
> emacs is for.)

I thought emacs was for testing whether *other* applications tested the
return values of malloc()...

Nah, the history stuff should stay, but it should be moved into the
parser loops (or loop) in initial.es, which is probably an implementation
issue.

Paul:
> i consider this a unix bug at least as serious as the spelling
> of creat.)

well, yeah, but it's just a hangover from the days of six-character
identifiers...

Harald:
> So I went ahead and implemented a two-argument cd:  If I cd out of a
> directory and suspect I may want to get back there some time, I give
> an optional second argument to cd.  Then I give that name to cd to get
> back there.  The default second arg is `-', so `cd -' acts like many
> people's `back'.

Interesting method. I just use "site" and "resite" myself (too much mudding.
i'm managed to break myself of the habit of typing "goto" instead of "cd",
though :-) But I use cdpath all the time, and still think it shouldn't be
a primitive. It isn't, here.:-).

Still Harald:
> Now trying to cd back
> to a directory that I didn't visit for a while can easily fail, as I
> haven't save the version of the path that will trigger the automounter
> to remount the volume.  Any good solutions for that one?

It depends on how your automounter is set up. my "site" function strips the
"/tmp_mnt" from the output of "pwd", and *everything* here is automounted
through "/net/machine", so the "resite" cd always uses the trigger path. Of
course, since i decide the automount config around here, i can rely on this:-).

Pete:
> No problems, use this version of pwd which will strip out the automounter
> directory [...] without calling external programs

Good point. i'll have to stop this naive translation of rc scripts to es...

steve.


I like the idea of an interative.es, provided that it's optional - i find
that it's a pain maintaining a .cshrc and a .login for the csh users here,
and *much* prefer having a single file. All it takes is an %is-interactive...