Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything.
For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did:
- wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-)
- delete several non-pdf files
- mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum
- move several pdfs to another directory
(split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target.
- mark several pdfs and open with reader app
Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here.
Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.
It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.
it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt
then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)
More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other)
or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.
I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?
Love that the "don't mess something up accidently" aka input lock is working in dired too(C-c C-q) Here it turns off input lock, so you can freely edit filenames in a dir like if it was a regular text buffer.
NGL, I find the Dired UX out of the box to be frustrating given its reliance on remembering key bindings, so much so that I ended up writing both a Transient menu and a context menu for it, both available in the Casual and Anju packages on MELPA, respectively. If interested, you can read more about them in the following links: https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu....
Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything.
For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did:
- wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-)
- delete several non-pdf files
- mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum
- move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target.
- mark several pdfs and open with reader app
Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here.
Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.
Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS.
DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.
It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.
C-q just tells me the buffer is read-only. How does that work?
it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt
then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)
I think 's' is sort.
More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other)
or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.
Check out sunrise-commander, it is Dired reskinned as a dual-paner. Love how convenient it is to have a powerful integrated file manager.
Is sunrise commander stable these days?
I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?
Try it out! It has its own learning curve, but it's convenient to use in quick and dirty situations.
Love that the "don't mess something up accidently" aka input lock is working in dired too(C-c C-q) Here it turns off input lock, so you can freely edit filenames in a dir like if it was a regular text buffer.
wdired is still magic to me. Use it almost every day.
dirvish is nice