https://xenodium.com/rm-important-txt-oh-sht/

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[favicon] [favicon] Alvaro Ramirez

Alvaro Ramirez

17 September 2022 $ rm Important.txt (uh oh!)

Setting Emacs up to use your system trash can potentially save your
bacon if you mistakenly delete a file, say from dired.

Unsurprisingly, the trash safety net also extends to other Emacs
areas. For example, discarding files from Magit (via magit-discard)
becomes a recoverable operation. As an eshell user, the trash can
also help you recover from rm blunders.

recovered_x1.6.webp

You can enable macOS system trash in Emacs by setting trash-directory
along with defining system-move-file-to-trash:

(setq trash-directory "~/.Trash")

;; See `trash-directory' as it requires defining `system-move-file-to-trash'.
(defun system-move-file-to-trash (file)
  "Use \"trash\" to move FILE to the system trash."
  (cl-assert (executable-find "trash") nil "'trash' must be installed. Needs \"brew install trash\"")
  (call-process "trash" nil 0 nil "-F"  file))