Interact with parent/preview directory directly?

[zackw]

Thank you for the bug report

• I am using the latest version of dirvish related packages.
• I checked CUSTOMIZING|EXTENSIONS.
• You may also try reproduce the issue using clean environment and minimal configurations with
  the command emacs -Q.

Bug description

In the multi-pane display brought up by M-x dirvish, weird things happen if you try to interact with the left (parent directory) pane at all, or the right (preview of selected directory entry) pane while that pane is displaying a subdirectory. Undesirable "weird things" I have noticed in 20 minutes of fooling around with it:

• Normal "window" selection operations won't let me put keyboard focus into the left pane. This might be intentional but it doesn't feel Emacsy. I expected to be able to C-x o in there and then interact with it like it was the middle (current directory) pane.
• Clicking on items in the parent pane with left or right mouse button does nothing. I expected this to load the selected directory in the middle pane.
• Clicking on items in the parent pane with middle mouse button mangles the contents of the parent pane -- inserting random gibberish, possibly whatever happens to be in X PRIMARY selection at the time -- and does put keyboard focus into the left pane, at which point it becomes apparent that that pane is editable like it's in Fundamental mode, which is certainly not what you meant to happen.
• C-x o will put me into the preview pane. If this pane is previewing a regular file, this lets me interact with it like I'd visited the file normally -- this is Good. However, if this pane is previewing a subdirectory, its contents appear to be a Dired buffer but it's actually in Fundamental mode (unlike the parent pane it genuinely is in that mode according to C-h m) and therefore does not behave anything like I expect a preview of a directory to behave.

OS

Linux

Emacs Version

27

[alexluigit]

Hi @zackw , thanks for your report. In the early versions of dirvish, actual dired buffers were used to fill the parent/preview window, but eventually this approach was dropped because of some issues it introduces:

1. it is hard to keep track of different settings (header, file details, etc.) for different dired buffers
2. it populates the buffer list with a lot of meaningless buffers
3. these extra buffers caused a lot of troubles on session reuse/init

For these reasons, the content in the parent/preview windows in dirvish now are just colorized plain text. If you want to interact with parent/preview directory, you can just navigate into that directory first.