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 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 (untested)

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

Installation

Dirvish is available on Melpa. Just type M-x package-install RET dirvish RET into Emacs 27.1+. el-get users can get the recipe from here.

For straight.el users, it is simply:

(straight-use-package 'dirvish)

Quickstart

After installation, let Dirvish take over Dired globally:

(dirvish-override-dired-mode)

M-x dirvish RET
Welcome to Dirvish! Press ? for help.
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.

Resources

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: