dired-hacks

Since this collection comes from my own config, it mostly contains stuff I use or find useful. If you have a good idea or nice usecase for some addition, feel free to send patches or start an issue (but patches are preferred :P).

Set of utility functions used in all the dired-hacks packages.

This package also provides these interactive functions:

• dired-hacks-next-file - go to next file, skipping empty and non-file lines
• dired-hacks-previous-file - go to previous file, skipping empty and non-file lines

The filtering system is designed after ibuffer: every dired buffer has associated "filter stack" where user can push filters (predicates). These filters are by default logically "anded", meaning, only the files satsifying all the predicates are shown.

Some filters take additional input from the user such as part of name, regexp or extension, other filters only use a predefined predicate such as "show only directories" or "omit dot files".

In addition, there are two "metafilters", the or filter and the not filter. These take other filters as arguments and change their logical interpretation. The or filter takes the two filters on top of the stack, pops them and pushes a filter that matches files satisfying one or the other (or both) filters. The not filter pops the top filter and pushes its logical negation.

To enable or disable the filters, toggle minor mode dired-filter-mode. Toggling this mode preserves the filter stack, so you can use it to quickly hide/unhide files filtered by the current filter setup.

All the provided interactive functions are available from dired-filter-map. You can customize dired-filter-prefix to set a prefix for this map or bind it manually to a prefix of your choice using:

(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "some-key") dired-filter-map)

The bindings follow a convention where the filters are mapped on lower-case letters or punctuation, operators are mapped on symbols (such as !, |, * etc.) and group commands are mapped on upper-case letters. The exception to this is p which is bound to dired-filter-pop, which is a very common operation and warrants a quick binding.

In addition to filtering, you can also use the same predicates to only mark files without removing the rest. All the filtering functions of the form dired-filter-by-* have their marking counterpart dired-filter-mark-by-*. These are available from dired-filter-mark-map. You can customize dired-filter-mark-prefix a prefix for this map or bind it manually to a prefix of your choice using:

(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "some-key") dired-filter-mark-map)

The marking operations are not placed on stack, instead, the marks are immediately updated by "OR"-ing them together. To remove marks that would otherwise be selected by a filter, use prefix argument (usually bound to C-u). To logically negate the meaning of the filter, you can call the function with a double prefix argument (usually C-u C-u)

While emacs already has the auto-mode-alist, this is often insufficient. Many times, you want to open media files, pdfs or other documents with an external application. There's remedy for that too, namely dired-guess-shell-alist-user, but that is still not as convenient as just hitting enter.

This package adds a mechanism to add "hooks" to dired-find-file that will run before emacs tries its own mechanisms to open the file, thus enabling you to launch other application or code and suspend the default behaviour.

By default, two additional methods are enabled, dired-open-by-extension and dired-open-subdir.

This package also provides other convenient hooks:

• dired-open-xdg - try to open the file using xdg-open
• dired-open-guess-shell-alist - try to open the file by launching applications from dired-guess-shell-alist-user
• dired-open-call-function-by-extension - call an elisp function based on extension.

These are not used by default.

You can customize the list of functions to try by customizing dired-open-functions.

To fall back to the default dired-find-file, you can provide the prefix argument (usually C-u) to the dired-open-file function. This is useful for example when you configure html files to be opened in browser and you want to edit the file instead of view it.

Note also that this package can handle calls when point is not on a line representing a file---an example hook is provided to open a subdirectory under point if point is on the subdir line, see dired-open-subdir.

If you write your own handler, make sure they do not throw errors but instead return nil if they can't proceed. Please, don't forget to submit interesting handlers!

This package adds more customizable highlighting for files in dired listings. The group dired-faces provides only nine faces and isn't very fine-grained.

The definitions are added by several macros, currently available are:

• dired-rainbow-define - add face by file extension
• dired-rainbow-define-chmod - add face by file permissions

You can display their documentation by calling (substituting the desired macro name):

M-x describe-function RET dired-rainbow-define RET

Here are some example uses:

(defconst my-dired-media-files-extensions
  '("mp3" "mp4" "MP3" "MP4" "avi" "mpg" "flv" "ogg")
  "Media files.")

(dired-rainbow-define html "#4e9a06" ("htm" "html" "xhtml"))
(dired-rainbow-define media "#ce5c00" my-dired-media-files-extensions)

; boring regexp due to lack of imagination
(dired-rainbow-define log (:inherit default
                           :italic t) ".*\\.log")

; highlight executable files, but not directories
(dired-rainbow-define-chmod executable-unix "Green" "-.*x.*")

The basic command to work with subdirectories in dired is i, which inserts the subdirectory as a separate listing in the active dired buffer.

This package defines function dired-subtree-insert which instead inserts the subdirectory directly below its line in the original listing, and indent the listing of subdirectory to resemble a tree-like structure (somewhat similar to tree(1) except the pretty graphics). The tree display is somewhat more intuitive than the default "flat" subdirectory manipulation provided by i.

There are several presentation options and faces you can customize to change the way subtrees are displayed.

You can further remove the unwanted lines from the subtree by using k command or some of the built-in "focusing" functions, such as dired-subtree-only-* (see list below).

If you have the package dired-filter, you can additionally filter the subtrees with global or local filters.

This package provides live filtering of files in dired buffers. In general, after calling the respective narrowing function you type a filter string into the minibuffer. After each change the changes are automatically reflect in the buffer. Typing C-g will cancel the narrowing and restore the original view, typing RET will exit the query mode and leave the filter in the narrowed state. To bring it back to the original view, you can call revert-buffer (usually bound to g).

These narrowing functions are provided:

• dired-narrow
• dired-narrow-regexp
• dired-narrow-fuzzy

You can also create your own narrowing functions quite easily. To define new narrowing function, use dired-narrow--internal and pass it an apropriate filter. The filter should take one argument which is the filter string from the minibuffer. It is then called at each line that describes a file with point at the beginning of the file name. If the filter returns nil, the file is removed from the view. As an inspiration, look at the built-in functions mentioned above.