Dired Html Move Like W Thirty Two (original) (raw)

Introduction

I’m a newbie to emacs and am beginning to use it full-time on W32.

One W32 feature is that whenever a file foo.htm is saved (in IE or Firefox) a directory called foo_files is created where associated css, images, javascript etc. files are stored. W32’s File Explorer automatically moves and deletes these *_files directories when you perform operations on the htm file.

This is not an emacs feature so much as it is a small band-aid to get emacs to do the same. So far, this was only integrated into the move function in dired, and it’s quite kludgey.

Hopefully some guru will suggest a better way to do it.

Install instruction steps

Steps (and code)

• In emacs, type C-h f dired-do-rename

• The help buffer will open and say it is a compiled file in dired-aux.elc – click the hyperlink.

• The dired-do-rename function is pretty simple. Add the following code just after the (interactive "P") line.

  (mapcar (function nsb-dired-mark-assoc-html-dir) (mapcar (function dired-make-relative) (dired-get-marked-files)))

• Just above the function dired-do-rename, add the following on its own line.

  (defun nsb-dired-mark-assoc-html-dir (fname) "Given html or htm file, mark the corresponding directory of images and stuff in dired (in Win32 such directories are usually moved along with the htm file so that relative image/css refs etc are preserved). This preserves the Win32 behavior (in Win32 a file foo.htm is accompanied by the foo_files directory). " (interactive "P") (let* ((tmp nil) (matchon (subseq fname 0 7)) (regexpis (concat matchon ".*_files"))) ;; note if filename is less than 7 chars, matchon will contain ;; the string .htm or .html and the regexpis value will be incorrect ;; since windows translates foo.htm to the directory foo_file
  (dired-mark-files-regexp regexpis)))

• Since this is an elisp buffer, do C-x C-s to save it. From the menu bar choose “Emacs-Lisp”, then the “Byte-compile And Load” menu item.

Conclusion

And that’s it. Now opening a dired buffer, selecting some htm files with ‘m’ and then typing ‘R’ for rename will take a while, but it will select the corresponding directory for renaming (aka moving) too.

It was fun discovering a way to do this, and I hope it’s possible to integrate it into all operations on htm files. Emacs rocks!

Caveats

• An arbitrary subseq length of 7 is chosen. This works fine for files like abcdefg.htm but not at all for foo.htm – what we’re really looking for here is a unique subsequence we can use a regexp with.
  • For example something like (matchon (subseq fname 0 (instring fname ".htm"))) should work where (instring "012ABC" "ABC") yields 3.
• It seems somewhat slow (but then my see-later-html directory has thousands of files, no thanks to reddit!).

Comments

This section is for suggestions, comments and improvements. Please add your [username] before your comment so that they’ll be threaded. There’s got to be a way to make this less kludgey..

NooBoo If the directory is not visible then it doesn’t get selected. Also it selects all directories starting with GoogleGroups, for instance, even though I select only one of those files. This is related to the caveat above.