Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: dired-preview version 0.2.0

This is a simple package to automatically preview in a side window the file at point in Dired buffers. Preview windows are closed when they are no longer relevant, while preview buffers are killed if they have not been used for other purposes beside previewing. The package provides several customisation options to control its behaviour.

Below are the release notes

This release brings many small improvements and fixes some bugs.

The preview shows up right away on new directories

In the past, entering a new directory would not trigger a preview: it would wait for some motion before doing so. This could make it seem that the mode was not enabled in the current buffer. Now, the preview shows up immediately.

Thanks to Nofint for the initial contribution in pull request 8: https://github.com/protesilaos/dired-preview/pull/8. The changes are small and do not require copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation.

Directories are previewed as well

The contents are displayed in a Dired buffer, using the current settings for it. This means that colours are possible icons are shown too.

Large files are previewed in hexl-mode

As the documentation of this mode suggests:

A mode for editing binary files in hex dump format. This is not an ordinary major mode; it alters some aspects of the current mode’s behavior, but not all; also, you can exit Hexl mode and return to the previous mode using C-c C-c.

The C-c C-c key binding toggles the mode, in case you want to see the raw output.

Thanks to Karthik Chikmagalur for the contribution. This was done on the now defunct mailing list: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/general-issues/%3C871qeb56bw.fsf@gmail.com%3E.

Previews are displayed in a full-featured mode

Before, we would delay the execution of the mode hooks to speed things up. Though this came at the cost of (i) making the buffer less capable and (ii) forcing us to handle the execution of those hooks at a later stage when they would be needed, which proved to be error-prone in a number of scenaria.

Files without an extension are still previewed

This is a bug fix. Before, they would be considered as part of the files to be ignored, per dired-preview-ignored-extensions-regexp.

Previews are not added to what recentf-mode tracks

Thanks to Juergen Hoetzel for reporting this issue and for tweaking my suggested patch for it. This was done in pull request 12: https://github.com/protesilaos/dired-preview/pull/12. The change is small, so Juergen does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

A nil value for split-width-threshold still works

We no longer consider this an error and adapt the preview accordingly. Thanks to Juergen Hoetzel for the contribution. This was done in pull request 11 and does not require copyright assignment: https://github.com/protesilaos/dired-preview/pull/11.

For developers: previews are done with cl-defmethod

Each file type will thus have its own method on how to display the contents in a buffer. The idea is to make this easier to extend. The goal is to have methods that can preview PDFs and images without blocking Emacs. Other file types can be considered as well, though those two are the immediate priority.

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