The 38th installment of Using Emacs is about dired, Emacs' built in mode for navigating and working with directories.

I'm not a dired power user and in fact am just now making a real effort to explore it and work it into my daily workflow and with that in mind, I'd love to hear some configuration and use suggestions from people who use it regularly.

Here's the configuration I use:

(use-package dired+
:ensure t
:config (require 'dired+)
)

which merely adds dired+ into the mix.

I also started playing with pcre2el which allows me to use the more usual regex syntax in place of Emacs regex syntax in both dired and other places. This is a big win for me since I never remember all the escaping rules for Emacs regex.

(use-package pcre2el
:ensure t
:config
(pcre-mode)
)

Finally, abo-abo and jcs have both written about new features in , Ivy/Swiper/Counsel that allow you to use ivy-occur to dump results into a dired buffer (link, link) but to get that to work, I needed to install wgrep and also had to install and setup fzf which looks to be useful.

(use-package wgrep
:ensure t
)

(setq counsel-fzf-cmd "/home/zamansky/.fzf/bin/fzf -f %s")

To help get started here are links to a couple of cheat sheets:

• dired reference card
• another dired cheat sheet

I'll probably use dired more frequently but again, would love to hear how other people are using it.