Emacs: Dired Plus Mode = dired with Extra Features

Xah Lee, 2010-09-15, …, 2012-11-12

Emacs has a file management mode called dired. 〔☛ dired tutorial〕 “Dired+” mode by Drew Adams, adds many more features to dired.

Nice Dired Plus Features

Here's some of its features i found very useful.

• More extensive syntax coloring. Now you can easily recognize different file types by color. (after using plain dired for 10 years, the first few days in dired+ i found the colors distracting, but now i prefer it.)
• F to open all marked files. (nice!)
• Press 【* .】 to marke files by extension. With dired, normally you do 【% m】 to mark by regex, then type something like \.html$. But now you can just type .html. (yes, you still need to type the dot.)
• Use menu 〖Mark ▸ Omit Marked〗 to omit some files. (useful especially if you use find-dired to list thousands of files but don't want a subset.)

Install

You can install it using emacs 24's package system. Dired Plus is in the MELPA package repository. Call list-packages to install. 〔☛ A Guide on Emacs 24 Package System〕

Dired Plus home page is at: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredPlus.

Customization

I didn't like some of the default color. You can change it by calling customize-group then “Dired-Plus”. For the color values, you can enter it using this syntax #7b68ee. To see a list of colors and their hex values, call list-colors-display.

See also: Emacs Advanced dired Tips.

Thanks to Jon Snader for the tip on marking files by extension.