If you spend any time browsing files in Emacs, you've probably wished for a bit more visual distinction in dired buffers?. While packages like all-the-icons-dired provide beautiful icon sets, they come with dependencies, font requirements, and potential compatibility issues. What if you could get meaningful visual file type indicators with just a few simple lines of pure Elisp? I have adapted the original idea provided by Emacs-solo and focused more on the earlier Unicode characters that are most likely to always be present in an Emacs environment.

If you’re an Emacs user (which I know you are), especially one who lives in dired-mode, you’re probably familiar with the quick power of isearch for finding files or directories. But if you’re like me, you might have noticed a tiny speed bump in the workflow: after finding a file or directory with isearch, you would typically have to hit <enter> to exit the search, and then <enter> again to open the entry. That’s two steps for something that feels like it should be one and this has been a very minor annoyance for me for a very long time now.

I am of course using org mode for organizing my tasks, notes and other paraphernalia.

Today I'll simply delve into two custom functions that I've had in my init file for quite some time, my/dired-create-directory and my/dired-create-empty-file

Just a quick one today. One of the great strengths of Emacs is its extensibility, I have mentioned before in adding the ability to disk report on the size of a directory in dired but I thought I would quickly revisit the topic, demonstrating the function I currently use.

I thought I would share a little bit of elisp that I've been using for a while now that allows me to quickly find a file. It leverages completing-read, allows the selection of the find method and will search recursively.

A common activity for a Software Engineer is to compare two directories, especially those that might require a level of merging. My preferred tool of choice in this instance is Meld

For a while now I've been using an rsync based dired-copy replacement for large copy asynchronous operations within emacs. It is not uncommon for me to want to copy large files in emacs and rather than waiting for the operation to finish I leveraged async-shell-command to perform an rsync copy as thus:

On a previous post I created an elisp function to quickly duplicate a file or directory in dired, by default it would copy the dired item under the cursor to an old suffix or append a number based on the universal argument.

For a while now I have been looking for a simple method in emacs for trimming down my largest files, usually this means locating those large image files and compressing them as I like keeping my media compressed or deleting any large files I didn't know were lurking around my system.

I have been using C-RET or W in dired for a while now to open a file externally via browse-url-of-dired-file.

Often I find myself refining my collection of photos and family videos, usually with the following process:

It is not uncommon for me to want the ability to quickly duplicate a file, especially if I am hacking around and just want a quick snapshot of a working file.

As the title says, it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to move away from deft. There are a few reasons for this:

Just a quick one.

dired can do most things for me especially now I have my DWIM image conversion scripts working and image-dired configured to my liking.

I previously wrote about wanting the ability in emacs to copy and paste files from one window to another just like a linux GUI file manager and after a little hunting around and experimentation I settled on putting together some elisp:

By default dired orders its files in alphanumeric order and when s is selected it sorts by date according to :

Something is still bugging me with my dired tidy up and I think it is wanting to add the ability to remove dot files.

Bit by bit I am getting to grips with dired and using this for more operations on my files.

My dired replacement of Dolphin / linux terminal continues. The next thing is something useful to me but uncommon and something that dired didn't seem to be able to do out of the box.

Now dired is becoming more ingrained into my muscle memory, navigating efficiently through the folder structure is becoming more prominent in my mind and it still doesn't feel natural enough.

The next step in my emacs journey is to move files around a little more easily, in fact more like a regular file explorer using the concept of file / folder selection copy and paste. That concept seems a little more natural to me than dired file marking, renaming / copying and then entering the path of the destination address.