After 3 years, Magnar Sveen has smiled upon us with a new episode of Emacs Rocks! For newcomers, Emacs Rocks! episodes are short videos of 2 or 3 minutes that explore some aspect of working with Emacs. If you haven’t already, be sure to spend some time watching them all. There’s a lot to learn.
The newest episode is about Dired. First Sveen shows how to make Dired show less information. This can be handy when you’re working with limited screen space and want to fit everything necessary into the Dired window. Sveen uses the dired-details package for this but you can get almost the same thing by toggling between short and long listings with (.
Next Sveen demonstrates how to easily copy files between directories by setting dired-dwim-target to t and opening another Dired for the target directory in another window. That’s very nice and it reminded me about using o to open a directory in another window.
Finally, Sveen demonstrates what is surely one of the nicest features of Dired: the ability to make the Dired buffer writable. Once made writable, you can make changes to the file names and/or attributes and those changes are reflected in file system when the buffer is saved. I use this all the time and it makes dealing with file changes so easy it would be reason enough by itself to use Dired.
This episode is only 1 minute 35 seconds long so there is no reason not to watch it now. Just follow the link.