Fuco, the author of the excellent smartparens package, has a collection of useful additions to dired. Rather than define a comprehensive package, he broken the functionality out into separate packages so that you can install just what you need.
He has a detailed README that describes the functionality of each package so you should take a look at that if you want details. Here’s a quick summary of the packages
- dired-filter
Filter the dired listing by one or more criteria. These are ANDed together by default but can also be ORed or NEGATED. - dired-avfs
Seamless archive browsing. Requiresavfsd. - dired-open
Improves upon the functionality that opens files with external programs - dired-rainbow
Extends the highlighting functionality - dired-subtree
Improves the formatting of dired subdirectory listings - dired-ranger
Adds some functionality from the ranger file manager that is missing in dired. - dired-narrow
Provides a sort of live filtering in dired buffers. - dired-list
Make a dired buffer from the output of a shell script.
If you like to anchor your workflow in a dired buffer, you may find some or all of these packages helpful.