Dired-rsync

Yi Tang has an interesting post on the dired-rsync package. It’s been around for a while, apparently, but I hadn’t heard of it before Tang’s post. The TL;DR is it allows you to use rsync in dired in the same contexts that you would otherwise use Copy.

Tang lists all sorts of reasons why he believes rsync is superior to cp and scp but, oddly, doesn’t mention the major one: rsync only send the parts of the file that are different from the target. It is, in short, a tool optimized for copying an updated file.

Much of the post is devoted to explaining how Tang has integrated the package into his workflow. It’s perfect for downloading large data files from a server to his local machine where he can manipulate and analyze them. He explains how he set everything up in case you have a similar use case and want to recreate his workflow.

It’s a nice post that also explains some of the gotchas if you want to use dired-rsync yourself. It’s on Melpa and setting it up is simple. You can simply copy Tang’s use-package configuration for an excellent starting—or permanent—setup.

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