Re: case sensitivity in 'find file'?

[John Paul Wallington]

Viktor Haag <vhaag@rim.com> writes:

> I'm using Emacs 21.3.50.1 built on Mac OSX through the Fink
> project with the tarball 'emacs-21.3.50-20040617.tar.gz'.
>
> I've seen new behaviour that I don't like; when I use 'find-file'
> the completion now seems to be case-insensitive. I find this
> annoying as it now sees ~/Library and ~/lib as similar requiring
> more keystrokes when finding a file in the ~/lib subtree.
>
> There must be a way to retrieve the old case-sensitive behaviour
> so that ~/Lib and ~/lib are matched as different names.
>
> Can some kind soul please let me know where the variables are
> that control this behaviour?

There isn't presently an obvious way because the builtin
`read-file-name' was changed to bind `completion-ignore-case' to t
before calling `completing-read' on DOS, NT, VMS and MACOSX systems.

You could partially revert that change to Fread_file_name, eg:

--- fileio.c    22 May 2004 23:17:17 +0100      1.505
+++ fileio.c    23 Jun 2004 17:19:07 +0100      
@@ -6284,7 +6284,7 @@
     }
 
   count = SPECPDL_INDEX ();
-#if defined VMS || defined DOS_NT || defined MAC_OSX
+#if defined VMS || defined DOS_NT
   specbind (intern ("completion-ignore-case"), Qt);
 #endif

Maybe there should be a `read-file-name-completion-ignore-case' user
variable ?