Sooner or later almost every Emacs user discovers Dired and becomes a dedicated—or even fanatical—user. It’s basically a file manager but embedded within Emacs. As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to be an old-timey sort of guy so my natural inclination is to do my file manipulations on the command line just as I have for years but even I am a Dired convert and do essentially all my file work with it.
Nicolas Martyanoff is pretty much the same but he has a problem with the default listing. His complaint is that there’s a lot of unnecessary information, often formatted in an inconvenient way. That would be a minor annoyance except that it often causes the (arguably) most important datum, the file name, to wrap and be difficult to read.
Fortunately, Dired is reasonably configurable by setting various variables. Martyanoff took advantage of this to produce a nicer Dired listing. The dates are all in ISO format and file sizes are given in bytes rather than the generally useless number of file blocks. The resulting listing is more pleasant and easier to read as you can see from Martyanoff’s post.
Dired, of course, gets its information from ls so getting a better date and size format just means changing the arguments to ls, which are specified in one of the above mentioned variables. Sadly, the required changes are specific to the GNU version of ls so you’ll have to use it.
Martyanoff doesn’t mention if this effects Wdired but there’s no reason it should. That would be a showstopper for many of us. Other than that, this seems like a nice change that might be worth implementing. There is just a bit of Elisp involved so it’s easy to try it out and experiment with it.