Mike Zamansky’s been busy dealing with admissions for next year’s Freshmen and other professorial duties but he has found time to give us a new video in his Using Emacs Series. This one is about using dired-subtree and dired-narrow, two packages that can simplify working with Dired.
The first package, dired-subtree, allows you to open a subdirectory displayed in a Dired listing inline with a single key. Zamansky has mapped this to Tab, which makes a lot of sense. Another Tab and the subdirectory listing is collapsed again. That can be very handy when you want to peek in a subdirectory but don’t want to open a separate Dired buffer.
The second package—the one that Zamansky finds a game changer—is dired-narrow. The idea is that you can (temporarily) narrow the Dired buffer to just the files you’re interested in. That makes it easier to see what you’re working with—especially with long Dired listings—or to perform a mass operation on just those files.
Both of these packages are part of Fuco1’s dired-hacks collection. I’ve written about dired-hacks before, here and here. If you’re a Dired user—and you should be—take a look at the collection to see if there’s anything that could improve your workflow.