[Geany-devel] [PATCH] Behavior of opening filenames with colons from the command line

[Lex Trotman]

On 16 August 2010 04:21, Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I saw yesterday a discussion about opening files that ends with
> something like ":2" [1], and even if it's already fixed, I don't feel
> that the behavior is neither the best nor the more intuitive.
>
> The current behavior is to:
> 1) if the file exists, don't try to extract the line/column information
> from the name
> 2) otherwise, extract these information without further checks.
>
> That's fine in most cases (who has files that ends with :<number>
> anyway? [2]) but what if I have a file named "file:1" and I want to open
> it at line 43? I'd think I just have to type "file:1:43", as I'd have
> done with any other file. But no, of course, it tries to open "file" at
> line 1, column 43.
> Then it's (IMO) quite like you can't open files that ends with :<number>
> on CLI unless you specify both line and column information (like before
> the bug was fixed), because the behavior is not the same than with other
> filenames.
>
> I then would think it's better to do:
> 1) if the file exists, don't extract line/columns information
> 2) otherwise, try to strip line information
> 3) if the file exists, stop here
> 4) otherwise, try to strip column information from the end [3]
> 5) if the file exists, stop here
> 6) otherwise, restore the name that was given, without stripping line
> and column.
>
> This seems to me to be a better behavior, since it prefers opening an
> existing file than a non-existing one; and if the file doesn't exist,
> prefer to keep the full name given.
> The joined patches implements this (see below).
>
> But OTHO, it makes harder to open "file:0" at line 1 if both "file:0"
> and "file:0:1" exists: it needs to hack in some way, for example typing
> "file:0:01" rather than "file:0:1"... Then we may want to complicate the
> thing a little more and prefer the file that exists with the shorter
> filename (then given "file:0:1" we would prefer "file" at line 0, column
> 1 over "file:0" at line 0 over "file:0:1" if all three exists...). If
> so, I'd be happy to implement it :p
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
> About the two patches:
> * 0001-cli-line-column-prefer-existing-files-2.patch is my original
> implementation, but as I rewritten it from scratch, it is very different
> from the original and almost all the code changes, so maybe you don't
> like it (thought it seems to be 37% faster [4]).
> * 0001-cli-line-column-prefer-existing-files.patch does the same but
> only changes a little the current code. It is less "beautiful" IMHO
> because the design doesn't fit very well what I wanted to do, but the
> large majority of the code is the same.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Colomban
>
>
> [1] Debain's bug #551358
> (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=551358), even though I
> think it should be closed...
> [2] and because of this, perhaps all this email is useless and
> time-wasting...
> [3] yes, line/column has to be swapped here, but that's a detail that
> needlessly complicates the explanation.
> [4] tested with the modifications, with 3000000 passes over 6 different
> inputs (34.375s vs 21.677s). Yes, it probably doesn't matter, and yes I
> like benchmarking useless things.
>
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>
>

Hi Colomban,

I am not criticising your attempt at improving this, instead I think
the whole idea of trying to have the line and column info on the
filename is wrong and will NEVER always be right until we make Geany a
mind reader (although if its reading my mind it will probably still be
wrong :-) because we can't think of all the ways "inventive"
programmers will come up with to structure filenames with :nn on the
end.

The +line --line and --column options are there to give an unambiguous
position and the :line:col capability should be removed.

Just in case it was common I checked vim and emacs documentation and
AFAICT neither does it.  Emacs supports +line:col as an arg but not
part of the filename.

Cheers
Lex