Charles Choi is on a roll. He discovered the trick of improving the interfaces to various Emacs functionalities by capturing them in a transient menu. I’ve already written about his considerable contributions to the usability of Calc: my last post is here.
Now he’s back with a nice interface to Dired. I do virtually ail my file operations with Dired but for whatever reason I don’t do a lot of them so whenever I want to do anything even slightly non-routine, I have to bring up the Dired cheat sheet, which I have bookmarked for easy reference.
Choi has solved that problem. Now a simple keystroke brings up the menu shown on his post and you can invoke any of the Dired functions right from the menu. Notice how it doesn’t get in your way. If you already know how to do something, you can just do it. If you can’t remember some command you can bring up the menu to invoke it and immediately return to your normal workflow.
I really like this package. It mostly stays out of your way but when you need it, it’s just a keystroke away. Doubtless Choi will make adjustments as he gains experience with the package but even now it seems like a win.