On Sun, 25 Jan 2009, Enrico Tröger wrote:
On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:28:41 -0500 (EST), Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com wrote:
There's multiple use cases this doesn't support too. I might want to save a file just to update its timestamp, or just to confirm that I have appropriate permissions to change it before I actually begin editing it.
For those things I would do in a console: touch filename or ls -l filename
There are several situations where the information given by "ls -l" is not actually sufficient to tell you whether you can edit a file. Examples include SELinux and Posix ACL environmentions. Network mounts can be difficult here too if the permissions mapping is done badly or is complicated.
Stepping aside from that, anytime a solution to an editing problem involves dropping to the command line, that suggests to me that there's something that could be improved in the editor.
If we add something like this, I'd prefer it to be a hidden option as it will be probably unlikely that many people will use it.
Within a few minutes of me sending my message, Thomas noted that this would be handy to him as well to update the timestamp so make will run again. That's one of the examples I was thinking of too. I know you would just run touch on the file. While I respect that and that this feature would be considered valuable by some, I think you'd be surprised by how many people would prefer this application to just work the same as most others here. UI consistency across applications is a virtue, and if something that improves that is available I can't imagine why you'd consider hiding it.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD