Álvaro Ramírez has another tweak to his Dired display environment. This time it’s a patch to hide the absolute path of the current directory in Dired listings. Ramírez likes to display minimal information in his Dired listings because, as he says, the full listing is only a toggle away so why clutter up your display with a bunch of information.
I’ve never understood this. I always want to see as much information as possible and I don’t want to do anything extra to see it. The last time I ranted about this, commenters jumped in to say it was all about not having enough screen real estate but even with my flagging eyesight, I’ve always been able to fit the whole Dired file listing in a split window of my 13″ laptop. Even if that’s not the case, removing the line at the top of the listing with the absolute path does nothing to decrease the width of the display.
Still, lots of folks have other values and really do want to see only the information they absolutely need. As usual, Emacs lets us have it our way. You can display all the available information or you can opt for abreviated information and simply toggle the display if you need more.
If you’re in the abbreviated information camp, take a look at Ramírez’s post to see how to prune the display. If you’re in my “show me everything” camp, the good news is that you don’t have to do anything: Emacs will show it all to you1.
Footnotes:
After I wrote this I vaguely remembered that sometime ago—10 years ago according to my Git log—Dired changed it’s default to show only the abbreviated information. I fixed that with
(setq diredp-hide-details-initially-flag nil)