Using Emacs's “Dired+” (DiredPlus) Mode

Xah Lee, 2010-09-15, …, 2012-01-24

Emacs has a file management mode called dired. (➲ dired tutorial) “Dired+” mode by Drew Adams, adds many more functionalities to dired.

Nice Features

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

More extensive syntax coloring, so you can easily recognize different file types. (after using plain dired for 10 years, the first few days 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. (you still need to type the dot though.)
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.)

These are in addition to extremely useful features in dired.

Install

Get it here: www.emacswiki.org Dired+.

To install, just place the file at 〔~/.emacs.d/dired+.el〕, then put this code (require 'dired+) in your emacs init file. Optionally, call byte-compile-file to make it load and run faster.

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.