Tweaks to my Dired config in Emacs
At some point during my latest round of build-emacs-config-from-scratch, I must have missed part of my Dired settings.
I want Dired to only show the file name rather than all the file attributes, and I want folders displayed first. Instead, now I see all file details and folders are sorted alphabetically right along with files. Like this:
The first thing was to sort so that folders show first. I figured it would be as simple as adding the --group-directories-first
switch to dired-listing-switches
but nope. The default ls
binary in macOS doesn't handle that option. To get it, I needed to install the "coreutils" package via Homebrew (brew install coreutils
).
coreutils prefixes binaries that have the same name as a macOS counterpart with "g", so their version of ls
is actually gls
. Rather than depend on shell aliases that sometimes don't seem to get picked up correctly in Emacs, I found a handy snippet of lisp and modified it like so:
(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
(let ((gls (executable-find "gls")))
(when gls
(setq dired-use-ls-dired t
insert-directory-program gls
dired-listing-switches "-aBhl --group-directories-first"))))
I added that to the package configuration for Dired and it worked like a charm.
Next was to get rid of all the extra information shown by default in directory listings. 99% of the time I don't care about permissions, ownership, or file sizes. I just want the file names. Dired has a built-in function for this: dired-hide-details-mode
. To make sure this gets run for every new Dired buffer, I added a hook:
:hook
(dired-mode . dired-hide-details-mode)
Now it looks the way I like it:
I can always toggle the file details back on by pressing (
.
FWIW, here's my entire dired configuration:
;; Dired
(use-package dired
:ensure nil ;; built-in
:defer t
:hook
(dired-mode . dired-hide-details-mode)
:config
(setq dired-dwim-target t) ;; do what I mean
(setq dired-recursive-copies 'always) ;; don't ask when copying directories
(setq dired-create-destination-dirs 'ask)
(setq dired-clean-confirm-killing-deleted-buffers nil)
(setq dired-make-directory-clickable t)
(setq dired-mouse-drag-files t)
(setq dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer t) ;; Tidy up open buffers by default
(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
(let ((gls (executable-find "gls")))
(when gls
(setq dired-use-ls-dired t
insert-directory-program gls
dired-listing-switches "-aBhl --group-directories-first")))))