emacs thing-at-point in a dired buffer

Question

I want to know what "thing" is at point in a dired buffer.

For instance Debug is a "directory":

drwxrwxrwx 0 10-08-2009 17:50 Debug

Makefile is a "file":

-rw-rw-rw- 15k 6-03-2009 13:02 Makefile

and this is a "header"

d:/foo/bar/Debug:

One way to find a thing is to look what face is at point. Is there another way to do it? How can I determine bounds-of-thing-at-point?

The standard (thing-at-point 'filename) does not handle spaces in a filename.

Answer 1

You can highlight text using overlays. Here are a couple of functions you could add to your .emacs file to do this. The key is that we name all of the overlays created this way 'my-highlights so that we can remove just those overlays later.

(defun highlight-thing-at-point ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((my-thing (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'sexp))
         (my-overlay (make-overlay (first my-thing) (rest my-thing))))
    (overlay-put my-overlay 'name 'my-highlights)
    (overlay-put my-overlay 'face 'highlight)))

(defun unhighlight-all-of-mine ()
  (interactive)
  (remove-overlays nil nil 'my-highlights))

EDIT:

You can add a custom function for returning the bounds of a filename at point that has spaces in it. See this EmacsWiki article for an example. So if you write a function named my-bounds-of-filename-at-point you can set it as the default for (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'filename) and (thing-at-point 'filename) like this:

(put 'filename 'bounds-of-thing-at-point 'my-bounds-of-filename-at-point)

Answer 2

The first character of the listing is d for directories, l for links, - for ordinary files. There are characters representing character and block devices, processes, etc. What more did you want to know? (I've never seen your "header" type. How did you produce that?)

Answer 3

These functions might be helpful in concocting what you want:

• dired-get-filename
• dired-move-to-filename
• dired-move-to-end-of-filename
• file-directory-p and friends