The more time I spend in Emacs’ Dired mode, the more I want to tweak things. I wrote about a few of these last year.
One other thing I wanted was to hide any hidden (.dot) files in Dired listings. The simplest way to do this would be to set dired-listing-switches from -al to -l instead. But that would always hide them. I wanted to toggle them on and off, like I can in Finder on macOS using CMD-Shift-..
I poked around the Emacs documentation and a handful of Reddit posts and cobbled together something that worked. I figured I might as well share it. I assume there are smarter ways to do this, but here are the relevant bits from my config.
(use-package dired
:init
(require 'dired-x) ;; I think this is required for dired-omit-mode
:bind
(:map dired-mode-map
("s->" . dired-omit-mode)) ;; toggle using Command-Shift-. same as macOS Finder
:hook
(dired-mode . (lambda () (dired-omit-mode))) ;; hide .dot files by default
:config
(setq dired-omit-files ;; hide .dot files when in dired-omit-mode
(concat dired-omit-files "\\|^\\..+$")))
This configuration means that every time I create a dired buffer, the .dot files are hidden. What I haven’t figured out is how to toggle it globally. Sometimes I want to show hidden files by default instead, for a while. It’s not hard to toggle them, but it would be nice to “turn them on” until I want to “turn them off” again. This works well enough for now, though.