Emacs: Dired Plus Mode = dired with Extra Features

Emacs has a file management mode called dired . [see dired tutorial] “Dired Plus” mode by Drew Adams, adds many more features to dired.

“Dired Plus” mode.

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!)

to open all marked files. (nice!) Press * . to mark 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.)

to mark files by extension. With dired, normally you do to mark by regex, then type something like . But now you can just type . (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. Alt + x list-packages to install. [see Emacs: Install Package with ELPA/MELPA]

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 Alt + x 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, Alt + x list-colors-display .

See also: Emacs Advanced dired Tips.

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