Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - dired-rsync

dired-rsync 0.7 released

2023-07-14T16:04:00+01:00

There haven't been many changes in the last few years but Liu Hui did submit a new package that allows you to use dired-rsync with a transient interface. Aside from that there have been a few minor bug fixes for a few issues and I spent some time cleaning up the bit rotted CI system by migrating from the broken Travis setup to using GitHub actions.

Enjoy!

v0.7

truncate process buffer output to last status line
raise minimum Emacs version to 25.1
new dired-rsync-transient frontend
various code clean-ups
new customisation hook dired-rsync-success-hook
moved the project CI to GitHub Actions
now understands alternate port syntax in tramp URIs

dired-rsync 0.6 released

2020-12-24T22:18:00+00:00

Given the slowly growing collection of fixes I thought it was worth cutting a new release for the benefit of those that get their dired-rsync via the stable MELPA channels. The biggest user visible change is dired-rsync no longer tweaks mode-line-process itself. You can now decide if to add dired-rsync-modeline-status in your modeline (or anywhere else if you wish).

Merry Christmas ;-)

v0.6

use tramp functions to decompose URIs (fix #22)
use username from dired URI if we have it in rsync
fix escaping of 's for remote-to-remote copies
better detection of running jobs by parsing buffers
increment the reverse proxy port based on active connections
don't set mode-line-process, leave it to user to put dired-rsync-modeline-status somewhere

dired-rsync 0.5 release

2019-11-10T19:42:00+00:00

If you've been running from MELPA you will have had all these features already but it was certainly overdue a stable tagging. The commit history shows a lot of faffing around getting the CI working again. However there are a bunch of customisation tweaks exposed as well as support for remote-to-remote rsync support (with a very ugly port-forward hack). From the NEWS file:

Big CI clean-ups (dropped emake, added Cask)
smarter modeline status (show R:n% when one job running)
make dired-rsync process dest with expand-file-name
we now support remote to remote with an ugly port forward hack
prompt the user for a passphrase if we detect stall in process
add some basic ert tests
new customisation option dired-rsync-source-files
new customisation hook dired-rsync-failed-hook

Happy file syncing ;-)

dired-rsync 0.4 released

2018-06-01T18:12:00+01:00

I started hacking on this a while back but I've finally done the house-keeping tasks required to make it a proper grown up package.

dired-rsync is a simple command which you can use to trigger an rsync copy from within dired. This is especially useful when you want to copy across large files from a remote server without locking up Emacs/Tramp. The rsync just runs as an inferior process in the background.

Today was mainly a process of cleaning up the CI and fixing any issues with it. I'd still like to add some proper tests but the whole thing is interactive and that seems to be tricky for Emacs to test. Anyway I've now tagged 0.4 so it will be available from MELPA Stable once it rebuilds. You can of course grab the building edge from MELPA any time ;-)

Working with dired

2018-04-07T11:12:00+01:00

I've been making a lot more use of dired recently. One use case is copying files from my remote server to my home machine. Doing this directly from dired, even with the power of tramp, is a little too time consuming and potentially locks up your session for large files. While browsing reddit r/emacs I found a reference to this post <https://vxlabs.com/2018/03/30/asynchronous-rsync-with-emacs-dired-and-tramp/> that spurred me to look at spawning rsync from dired some more.

:: r/emacs: http://reddit.com/r/emacs

Unfortunately the solution is currently sitting in a pull-request to what looks like an orphaned package. I also ran into some other problems with the handling of where rsync needs to be run from so rather than unpicking some unfamiliar code I decided to re-implement everything in my own package <https://github.com/stsquad/dired-rsync>.

I've still got some debugging to do to get it to cleanly handle multiple sessions as well as a more detailed mode-line status. Once I'm happy I'll tag a 0.1 and get it submitted to MELPA.

While getting more familiar with dired I also came up with this little helper:

(defun my-dired-frame (directory)
  "Open up a dired frame which closes on exit."
  (interactive)
  (switch-to-buffer (dired directory))
  (local-set-key
   (kbd "C-x C-c")
   (lambda ()
     (interactive)
     (kill-this-buffer)
     (save-buffers-kill-terminal 't))))

Which is paired with a simple alias in my shell setup:

alias dired="emacsclient -a '' -t -e '(my-dired-frame default-directory)'"

This works really nicely for popping up a dired frame in your terminal window and cleaning itself up when you exit.