Xah Lee has updated his Emacs Advanced dired Tips page. I thought I knew all this stuff but Lee has some tips I wasn’t aware of. For example, you can configure what dired does when you try to copy or delete a directory. You can have it ask once for the top directory, ask for every directory and subdirectory, or not allow it at all.
At the bottom of the page he has a pointer to his Using Emacs’s “Dired+” (DiredPlus) Mode page. Almost every time I blog about a dired feature someone will comment that the feature doesn’t work for them. That’s because I use dired+. I’ve been using dired+ for so long I always forget that I’m running it instead of plain dired. Everyone should be using it. There’s no reason not to and it’s easy to install with ELPA. There’s virtually no configuration either. Here’s what I have in my init.el:
(require 'dired+) (put 'dired-find-alternate-file 'disabled nil) ;enable `a' command
The put command enables the 【a】 command that replaces the current dired buffer rather than opening an additional buffer when you move to another directory. If you don’t include that, Emacs will ask you if you want to enable it when you try to use it so it’s not necessary to include it.
Take a look at Lee’s Advanced dired page and for goodness sake install dired+ if you haven’t already.