Re: dired and wdired problems

On Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:11:41 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote:

>> Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:25:11 +0530
>> From: Madhu via "Emacs development discussions." <[email protected]>
>> 
>> 
>> The current dired behaviour on master when reading a wildcard which
>> doesn't exist is thus:
>> 
>> mkdir /tmp/a
>> emacs -Q /tmp/a
>> 
>>   - this starts up with dired with a single window showing the empty
>>     directory /tmp/a
>> 
>> M-x dired /tmp/a/*nonexist* RET
>> 
>> This results in two windows, and shows *scratch* in the top window and
>> *ls error* in the bottom window. now repeat the same command:
>> 
>> M-x dired /tmp/a/*nonexist* RET
>> 
>> This switches the buffer in the top window to show `/tmp/a' again
>> 
>> The behaviour I expect is that if dired cannot display the directory it
>> shouln't switch the buffer currently being displayed.  What do you
>> think?
>
> Stephen, please look into this, it sounds like some fallout from
> recent Dired changes.

Yes, this behavior is a by-product of 3b7d9e37ce0c.  I agree this is
surprising behavior, so I filed bug#81509 and included there a patch to
address it.

Steve Berman