Sunrise Commander: Version 5 released

[José A . Romero L .]

Hello, Emacs Community!

For those who don't know yet, the Sunrise Commander is a powerful and
versatile twin-pane file manager for GNU Emacs built on top of Dired,
inspired by the Midnight Commander and heavily influenced by the OFM
specification (http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml).

Year 2010  brought to the Sunrise Commander a lot of improvements and
a few original new features. Here is a list of the most important and
noteworthy changes made since version 4 (r244) was first published:


NEW FEATURES:

* Added progress feedback for all synchronous copy, clone, rename and
  directory comparison operations  (using the standard Emacs progress
  reporter).

* Created  Tree  View Extension which provides a hierarchical view of
  directories that can be used for fast navigation, as  well  as  for
  several basic operations on files and directories. For more details
  and screenshots see:

      http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander#toc8

* Added  Fuzzy  Narrow command (C-c /), which allows to interactively
  refine the contents of the current pane using fuzzy (a.k.a. flex or
  scatter) matching, in a similar way as Text Mate's Command-T works,
  but with some extra features (like using  !  to  prefix  characters
  that should *not* occur after a certain position).

* Added  Sticky Search command (C-c s), which launches an interactive
  search in the current pane and maintains it active while navigating
  from  directory  to directory until a regular file is hit or C-g is
  pressed to interrupt the search.

* Created ELPA repository, which allows to easily install Sunrise and
  any of its extensions using the ELPA package management system. For
  more details see:

    http://joseito.republika.pl/sunrise-commander/

* Added  support for Desktop (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeskTop)
  in the core Sunrise Commander as well as in all relevant extensions
  --- Allows to save the state of the panes, tabs, etc. between Emacs
  sessions.

* Added  Create  Files command (M-+), which allows to create an empty
  file by giving its name in the current directory, or (when  invoked
  with  a  numerical  prefix) any number of files with names numbered
  according to a provided formatting string, using decimal (%d),octal
  (%o) or hexadecimal (%x) digits.


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS:

* DOES NOT BREAK TRAMP any more when AVFS support is disabled (thanks
  Haines Brown for reporting this problem and helping fixing it).

* Faster and more reliable "compare panes by contents" function (uses
  md5 digest memoization).

* Improvements in terminal integration:

  - Line mode is preserved across invocations of sr-term (C-c t),

  - Added binding (C-c t) to launch a new terminal directly from
    another one.

  - Added revert buffer of the active pane from the command line,

  - Added panes-resizing operations (min, max, reset) from the
    command line.

  - Terminal buffers are now automatically closed when their
    processes finish.

* Find  can  be  now  limited  to  the selected (marked) items in the
  active pane.

* Locate is now executed in the background, without locking Emacs.

* More  uniform  interface  for  find and locate operations: both are
  asynchronous, can be fired similarly and  aborted  using  the  same
  binding (C-c C-k).

* Traditional commander key bindings (F1...F10, Ins, etc) are enabled
  by default now.  Added new option sr-use-commander-keys that can be
  customized to toggle their use without restarting Emacs.


OTHER CHANGES AND BUGFIXES:

* Fixed handling of iso9660 images and patch files via AVFS.

* The  width of the panes is now correctly maintained when maximizing
  or minimizing their height. It is  also  sticky  across  successive
  invocations of Sunrise.

* Browsing  files inside a text browser (e.g. w3m) after pressing "b"
  in Sunrise works now like a quick view:  it  can  be  scrolled  and
  closed from inside the FM with the usual bindings (C-e, C-y, Space,
  M-Space and C-u C-v)

* Fixed  sr-find-file (C-x C-f) --- works now correctly for all types
  of objects in the filesystem, not just files.

* Fixed refresh of path line in console displays.

* Fixed focus of origin subdirectory when moving up in the filesystem
  using the path line.

* Added separate face settings for TTY displays.

* Bound Space and M-Space to page scrolling in quick view.

* Improved MC-compatible keybindings: added C-F3/F4/F5/F6 for sorting
  and S-F7 for soft-linking.

* When visiting a regular file, the original windows configuration is
  now correctly restored.

* Bound "C-x k" to sr-quit.


CHANGES IN BUTTONS EXTENSION:

* Added  generic  (buffer-local)  handler for commands in the Sunrise
  Buttons extension.

* Added new commands to panel: Clone (K), Search (A) and Fuzzy Narrow
  (C-c /).

* Buttons panel doesn't clobber terminal or quick view anymore.


CHANGES IN LOOP EXTENSION:

* Added  progress  feedback  for  asynchronous copy, clone and rename
  operations.


CHANGES IN MIRROR EXTENSION (released as version 2):

* Added navigation inside and out of mirror areas.

* Added separate face for the pane path when in mirror mode.


CHANGES IN MODELINE EXTENSION:

* Improved  mode  indicators  in  Mode Line extension: instead of one
  unique icon for  everything,  there  are  now  tree  for  different
  (orthogonal) states of the pane. See
  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander#toc6 for details.

* The mode line now displays absolute paths always.


CHANGES IN TABS EXTENSION:

* The sr-tabs-remove commands (C-k, M-C-k) can be now prefixed with a
  digit to kill arbitrary tabs in the active or passive pane by their
  relative orders (starting from 1).

* Added new bindings "* C-k" and  "* M-C-k" to wipe off all currently
  displayed tabs either from the active or the passive pane.

* Added new bindings for tab-switching: M-Tab and C-M-Tab.

* Improved  sr-tabs-kill-and-go (C-x k) function -- logically extends
  sr-quit.

* Removed soft dependency on cl-seq.el.

For  more  details  on the Sunrise Commander, a list of all currently
available extensions, and several useful tips and tricks visit:

    http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander

As usually, enjoy ;-) All contributions, suggestions or comments will
be very welcome.

Cheers, and Happy 2011!
--
José Alfredo Romero L.
escherdragon at gmail.com
"The opposite of war is not peace -- it's creation." (Jonathan Larson)