Re: .saves in XEmacs

David> (X)Emacs creates ".saves*" to record some information (I'm not David> sure what). The difference is that Emacs creates a name that David> ends in "~" while XEmacs does not. The "~" in the name makes David> it easier to collect and delete these files using David> dired-flag-backup-files. Could XEmacs change to use this David> convention? APA> M-x recover-session is the proper interface to these autosave APA> files. This will bring up a dired buffer in which you can mark, APA> visit, delete the session files. David> Hmmm. The documentation in that buffer could be written a David> little better. The text mentions using 'd' to mark a file David> for deletion, but it doesn't tell you about expunge. APA> Any suggestions, or patches even? Actually, I don't see a reason for bringing up a dired buffer for recover-session anyway. Wouldn't it be enough to just ask for a "Session file?" in the minibuffer and allow filename completion to do the rest. This special dired buffer doesn't seem to be doing anything special that you need to confuse people with having yet another methodology for doing file selection (minibuffer query, X popup, Dired, ???). David> Because the buffer is accessed via a special command David> (recover-session) and because the format of the buffer is David> slightly different, its not obvious that the buffer is a dired David> buffer or that all the same rules apply. APA> Doesn't it say Dired in the modeline? Sure, but the differences were enough to make me think there was probably something else going on here. After all, dired buffers don't have "^C^C" commands for selecting a file to pass to some other operation. Since the buffer went out of its way to put at the top what should be done, it's easy to think that that's the only things that can be done. APA> It's probably a feature they can't inadvertently be deleted APA> with the common idiomatic sequence of APA> ~ runs the command dired-flag-backup-files APA> x runs the command dired-expunge-deletions David> Perhaps. That's certainly what I do with GNU Emacs. Since David> I never really understood what they were and since they David> were always showing up, I just wanted to get rid of them. David> BTW, I have never seen any info documentation of David> recover-session (although there is docs on recover-file). David> Am I missing something? (This would explain the previous David> paragraph.) APA> I get this with APA> C-h a recover-session RET Obvious (as is describe-function), but its not really an explanation of recover-session in the same sense as the Auto Save section of the XEmacs Info docs for recover-file. * what is a session? * why would I want to recover it? * what will it recover when I recover it? * how does it differ from (a set of) auto save files? (I can guess some, but I don't really know the answers to these, so don't ask me to write the info docs on it. ;-) -- David Masterson Sr. R&D Engineer Synopsys, Inc.