A short tip today.
When you delete files and directories in Emacs 23 (say, with dired), instead
of losing the files until the end of times (or at least until the
singularity), you can move them to the 'trashcan', by whatever name that rose
comes in your system, 'Trash' or 'Recycle Bin'…
To enable this, put the following in your .emacs:
(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t)
There is one problem - a bug? I am using Ubuntu 9.04, which follows the
Freedesktop Trash Spec; it moves delete file in ~/.local/share/Trash,
together with some metadata, so it can restore the file to their original
location. However, emacs follows some older convention, ie. to move the file
to ~/.Trash, and without any metadata.
You can partially fix this by making ~/.Trash a symlink to
~/.local/share/Trash/files/, but of course that does not get you the
metadata.
8 comments:
capture the metadata:
(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t)
(defun system-move-file-to-trash (filename)
(shell-command (concat "gvfs-trash " filename)))
@jfm3: that's clever!
[ some quoting for the filename is needed though.. suppose you have a file called "foo; cd $HOME; rm -rf *" ]
Nice one. I prefer Unix "rm is serious business" semantics, but I didn't know Emacs did this, and I know people who would find it useful.
How convenient that emacs provides a function for shell-quoting things. This works perfectly.
(defun system-move-file-to-trash (filename)
(shell-command (concat "gvfs-trash " (shell-quote-argument filename))))
Oh, and if you don't use gvfs (part of GNOME), you can install the trash-cli package and replace "gvfs-trash" with just "trash".
Hmm. Using this can cause some problems. Files outside your home directory are untrashable. In particular, files in /tmp/emacs1000/. If you use emacsclient, emacs will be unable to trash the server socket on exit, and next time you start emacs, emaceclient will not work.
To fix this, we need a trash-or-rm command:
$ cat > ~/bin/trash-or-rm.sh
#!/bin/sh
## This attempts to trash a file (or files), and then attempts to remove it if it still exists.
trash "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1
rm -f "$@"
[Control-D]
I hope this blog didn't munge any characters in that script, but I think you get the idea. Then,
(defun system-move-file-to-trash (filename)
(shell-command (concat "trash-or-rm.sh " (shell-quote-argument filename))))
Feel free to embellish the script as necessary. For example, you could manually move things to the trash if they're not too big.
I've updated my solution. See EmacsWiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SystemTrash
Please note use of the freedesktop.org trash can was added to emacs 23.2 (resolved bug #973). It was too late to make feature freeze for 23.1, but is in fact the default in CVS HEAD.
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