SYNOPSIS
ded allows you to navigate through multiple file lists or a
directory tree, viewing or changing file attributes rapidly.
In addition to conventional file information, it
operates on the file's RCS or SCCS archives,
making it useful for source-control as well as system administration.
Curses-based, it runs on UNIX systems.
HISTORY
This is a long-term project.
I originally began in 1984, enhancing a version of dired
(written by Jay Lepreau <lepreau@cs.utah.edu>)
while at the ITT Advanced Technology Center.
There is some dispute over whether that dired is based on the emacs mode
introduced around the same time (1980) or the reverse (since neither
program's documentation at the time credited the other),
but it is indisputable that both
were inspired by an earlier stand-alone program running on Tenex available
in the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) in 1978.
That early dired had crude display management,
which allowed a user to enter shell commands and see them at the bottom
of the screen - not something that curses was designed to do.
Among other changes, I modified the program to allow the
user to change the fraction of the screen which was devoted to the
command output.
Subsequently, I designed and implemented
a series of directory editors including
flist,
and this program (which uses a directory-tree module from an earlier program
written in 1987).
Most of this design dates from 1988, with more recent work being
directed to
- auto-configuring
- handle window-resizing events
- use line-drawing characters in the directory-tree
- use color (influenced by the scheme used on Linux,
but without the limitations imposed by its hard-coded behavior)
- interfaces for other source-control systems including CVS.
The line-drawing, color and other curses features (such as the
management of the non-curses area of the screen)
were why I became involved in
ncurses,
and provided the motivation to make ncurses more than the decaying hack
which it was in early 1995.
Download (you'll need the library):
Related utilities (RCS and SCCS):
Unrelated utilities (using td_lib):