15 Days in Dired

As I was exploring Spacemacs, I challenged myself to do all file management with Dired for 15 days. I was able to get most of the stuff done quite easily even with my limited knowledge of Spacemacs. And the experience only got better as I kept on using it. Here’s what I liked the most.

navigation is much better

Know where you want to go? Just start typing… then press Enter.
Edit: Press Ctrl + S, then start typing… then press Enter.

terminals open in the same directory

When you open a terminal from a Dired buffer, it automatically does a cd into the same directory.

one-off commands are easier

You can run an external command on files using the ! and & keys.

xdg-open is your friend

We expect that double-clicking on a file will open it in the “default application”. This can be done with xdg-open. Because xdg-open is hard to type, I symlinked it to xoxo.

$ sudo ln -sT /usr/bin/xdg-open /usr/bin/xoxo

split screen is phenomenal

Press o instead of Enter to open a folder in a separate window. When you try to copy files while having split windows open, Spacemacs automatically suggests the path opened in the other split.

tldr;

✨ It works. It’s awesome. ✨
Dired is a reasonable alternative to an external or graphical file manager. Already knowing a fair bit of Emacs, I found it very easy to work with Dired.