Emacs dired-mode as a file manager

I didn't see this mentioned in the article, so I thought I would mention it here:

Dired stands for directory editing.

One of my favourite features of Dired is the ability to mark or unmark multiple files in a variety of ways: manually, using repetition counts, or with regular expressions. This can be done fluidly and spontaneously as we browse and inspect files. Once we're satisfied with our selection, we can perform bulk operations on them such as copying, moving, deleting, changing permission bits, compressing the marked files, etc.

It's a bit like how we can use a GUI desktop environment to mark multiple files and then perform bulk operations on them. This is something we cannot easily do on the shell with the standard Unix utilities. But we can do all of this from within Emacs using very concise sequence of keystrokes and muscle memory.

Further, unlike most GUI desktop environments, every Dired interaction is scriptable, recordable, and replayable. I mean every operation or key sequence in Dired is available as an Elisp function, so we can script repetitive tasks by writing small Elisp snippets. Or, alternatively, we can have Emacs record the repetitive actions as keyboard macros, which we can then replay as many times as needed. I no longer have to worry whether the underlying GUI desktop environment supports these features or not because I know Emacs does and I can just use Emacs to browse my system.

And that brings me to another important benefit of using Dired: my muscle memory for Dired is transferable across a wide variety of systems and environments. It doesn't matter whether I'm working locally or logged into a remote shell, or whether I'm on macOS, Xfce4, KDE, etc. I can browse and edit my files and directories in exactly the same way using the same muscle memory and the same set of Dired commands, key sequences, and features!

A couple of years ago, I used to host Emacs book club meetings. I've kept some notes on directory editing with Dired from those sessions here: <https://susam.net/cc/mastering-emacs/ch06.html#dired>.

I use dired for a long time now and at first it felt a bit weird but not anymore. The ultimate killer feature is wdired [1] that make the dired buffer writeable and you can edit text/filenames/permissions like in any other emacs buffer and commit the changes with C-c C-c.

1: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wd...

wdired-change-to-wdired-mode, FTW! :-) An extremely cool feature is dired buffers are editable for changing file names and permissions. You can even use this feature, en masse, with other features like rectangle edit.

In dired-mode, I want to have a split view of the directory listing on the left window and to quickly browse the content of each file on the right window. The default file visit command keeps opening a new window for each file which needs closing. It's really annoying. I put the following in init.el file and bind it to a key. It loads the current file under the cursor in the next existing window on right, on left, above, below, or opening a new window as needed.

  ;; In dired mode, visit the file at the cursor in the right/below/left/above window.
  (defun my-dired-display-direction ()
    (interactive)
    (let* ((file-or-dir (dired-get-file-for-visit))   ;; get the file at cursor
           (buffer (find-file-noselect file-or-dir))) ;; load the file into a buffer
      (let ((window                                   ;; figure out the window to use
             (cond ((get-buffer-window buffer (selected-frame)))
                   ((window-in-direction 'right))     ;; try window in each direction
                   ((window-in-direction 'below))     ;; and default to right
                   ((window-in-direction 'left))      ;; if no window found.
                   ((window-in-direction 'above))
                   (t (split-window (selected-window) nil 'right)))))
        (window--display-buffer buffer window 'window nil)
        window)) )
  
  ;; Bind ctrl-o to display at direction.
  (define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "C-o") 'my-dired-display-direction)

> "Opening them from dired-mode already puts them into emacs, so"

This also works globally with #'find-file-at-point (which isn't bound to a hotkey by default, but should be: this is one of my most satisfying hotkeys. That function opens any filepath appearing as a string, in any context, in the working directory of that context—filepath strings in files, and filepath strings as outputs from shell commands, being the top two).

(It's like converting every file reference into a clickable URL—only, implicitly).

The most amazing part of guix (and nixOS) is that you can just copy that piece of code into your home-config.scm and have it running in a few seconds. It's pretty mind blowing.

The one thing I miss about dired-x is being able to edit multiple filenames simultaneously in the same way you do edit a file using multiple cursors, and commit the changes all at once. Can someone make that work in Windows Explorer or VS Code please?

my absolute favorite feature of dired is rw mode (^x ^q) - edit your dir like a normal text file. use regex replacement, macros with counters, multi cursor - whatever you like. See the result of your edits, commit bam. much more fun than piping find through something

Slight nitpick: It’s no longer called a “MIME Type”, it’s now called an “Internet Media Type”.

The insanity of trying to shoehorn everything into emacs, even calling it an OS, is purely beyond.

My file manager is the shell and the utilities like cp, mv, rm, find, xargs, grep, etc.

Have never felt the need for anything beyond that.