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A polished Dired with batteries included

Introduction

The experience of dirvish is surreal and even bizarre after all these years of trying to use dired. Like how professionals make their craft look easy, dirvish does something similar with how it builds on dired. Dirvish is paradoxical in that it provides a completely different experience while still fundamentally being dired at its core.

– @noctuid (source)

Dirvish is an improved version of the Emacs inbuilt package Dired. It not only gives Dired an appealing and highly customizable user interface, but also comes together with almost all possible parts required for full usability as a modern file manager.

Screenshots

Prerequisites

This package requires GNU ls (gls on macOS), and optionally:

• fd as a faster alternative to find
• imagemagick for image preview
• poppler | pdf-tools for pdf preview
• ffmpegthumbnailer (Linux/macOS) | mtn (Windows) for video preview
• mediainfo for audio/video metadata generation
• tar and unzip for archive files preview

Toggle install instructions

macOS

brew install coreutils fd poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick

Debian-based

apt install fd-find poppler-utils ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick tar unzip

Arch-based

pacman -S fd poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick tar unzip

FreeBSD

pkg install gnuls fd-find poppler ffmpegthumbnailer ImageMagick7 gtar

Windows

# install via Scoop: https://scoop.sh/
scoop install coreutils fd poppler imagemagick unzip

You might also want to install mtn for video preview.

Installation

Dirvish is available from Nongnu-Elpa and Melpa. You can install it directly via M-x package-install RET dirvish RET on Emacs 28.1+. After installation, activate Dirvish globally with M-x dirvish-override-dired-mode RET.

Quickstart

• M-x dirvish RET

  Welcome to Dirvish! Use your favorite dired commands here!

• M-x dired | dired-jump | … RET

  Dirvish takes care all of your Dired entries.

• M-x dirvish-dwim RET

  If the selected window is the only window, open Dirvish, otherwise open Dired.

• M-x dirvish-dispatch RET

  This is a help/cheatsheet menu powered by transient.el, the same library used to implement keyboard-driven menus in Magit and many Dirvish extensions. If you prefer this interaction style, consider binding these menus to dirvish-mode-map. See example config for details.

Documentation

For more dirvish customization options and features, see our documentation:

• Customizing
• Extensions
• FAQ
• Absolute beginner’s guide

Resources

To delve deeper into Dirvish, explore these resources:

• Related projects
• Changelog
• Discussions

Acknowledgements

This package took inspiration from the terminal file manager ranger and treemacs from Alexander Miller. Some of the extensions was initially a rewrite of packages provided by dired-hacks. These extensions have been greatly enhanced in comparison to the original versions.

Thanks Fox Kiester (@noctuid) for the awesome summary of Dirvish.

Code contributions:

Useful advice and discussions:

• Fox Kiester
• JD Smith
• karthink
• gcv
• aikrahguzar
• Daniel Mendler

The name dirvish is a tribute to vim-dirvish.

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