Dired, Buffer selection via C-M-L

[Robert W. Kerns <RWK at SCRC-TENEX>]

    Date: 7 May 1982 09:57-EDT
    From: Philip E. Agre <AGRE at MIT-AI>
    In M-X Dired, if you hit "H" on column 1 on line 1 then you get an error
    Function NIL not defined (though C-U H doesn't blow up), 
Fixed in 210.17.
							     and if you Abort out
    of the error then the Dired gets buried under N other buffers and you can't
    even get at it with C-n C-M-L for arbitrarily large n.  Both behaviors seem
    wrong.
Well, if you could get at it with C-n C-M-L it would turn up at annoying times.
Most of the time when you're done with a DIRED, you're done with it.

    Which reminds me, why not generalize C-n C-M-L to mean "move to the n-th
    buffer from the top on the list C-X C-B gives you" rather than just "move to
    the n-th previously selected buffer" (which isn't really an accurate
    description of its operation anyway, since it seems like it really refers to
    just the same list C-X C-B gives you anway)?  
Sounds pretty accurate to me, since C-X C-B lists the buffers in
most-recently-selected order.  It is ambiguous, however.  Got a better
way to phrase it?  Anyway,  I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
It sounds to me like "Why not generalize it to do X rather than Y, which
isn't really accurate because it really does X anyway?".  Am I mis-parsing
something?
						  One answer might be that you
    want C-1 C-M-L to rotate only that part of the "buffer stack" whose buffers
    have actually been selected at that point (as opposed to having been loaded
    using explicit calls to zwei:load-file-into-zmacs, as with the zwei-load
    hack in defsystem, for which see batali;sys >).  The response to that is that
    all you have to do is to be careful to define the notion of buffer stack 
    rotation so that only selected buffers rotate.  Since I use buffer stack
    rotation only rarely and C-n C-M-L for large n frequently, this doesn't seem
    like a bad trade-off to me.
All you have to do is to not put buffers you don't want to participate in
buffer stack rotation on the buffer history list (or remove them).  The name
of the variable is *ZMACS-BUFFER-HISTORY*.  Of course, this means you can't
use C-M-L on them the first time.

I must confess I don't understand why you'd want to use C-large-n C-M-L.
C-X B or C-X C-B seem faster to me than counting my buffers.