Have never felt the need for anything beyond that.
For example, if I'm editing a file called originalfilename.txt, and I decide it should be called newfilename.txt, I can mv originalfilename.txt newfilename.txt in the terminal and it's all good, but you're still editing the buffer originalfilename.txt in emacs and if you save it you will have a new file with that name.
Using dired to change the filename updates all the buffers that are using that file.
dired gets some hate, I think because it creates a lot of buffers and they tend to stick around, but it's never bothered me.
There's a variable in recent versions of emacs that deals with that
dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer
I didn't need a replacement for Windows Explorer, until I tried Linux (bash, really) out of boredom/curiosity, and now I can't imagine going back.
Could be that there's another step up. And we can't see it from where we are standing.
Dired stands for directory editing.
One of my favourite features of Dired is the ability to mark or unmark multiple files in a variety of ways: manually, using repetition counts, or with regular expressions. This can be done fluidly and spontaneously as we browse and inspect files. Once we're satisfied with our selection, we can perform bulk operations on them such as copying, moving, deleting, changing permission bits, compressing the marked files, etc.
It's a bit like how we can use a GUI desktop environment to mark multiple files and then perform bulk operations on them. This is something we cannot easily do on the shell with the standard Unix utilities. But we can do all of this from within Emacs using very concise sequence of keystrokes and muscle memory.
Further, unlike most GUI desktop environments, every Dired interaction is scriptable, recordable, and replayable. I mean every operation or key sequence in Dired is available as an Elisp function, so we can script repetitive tasks by writing small Elisp snippets. Or, alternatively, we can have Emacs record the repetitive actions as keyboard macros, which we can then replay as many times as needed. I no longer have to worry whether the underlying GUI desktop environment supports these features or not because I know Emacs does and I can just use Emacs to browse my system.
And that brings me to another important benefit of using Dired: my muscle memory for Dired is transferable across a wide variety of systems and environments. It doesn't matter whether I'm working locally or logged into a remote shell, or whether I'm on macOS, Xfce4, KDE, etc. I can browse and edit my files and directories in exactly the same way using the same muscle memory and the same set of Dired commands, key sequences, and features!
A couple of years ago, I used to host Emacs book club meetings. I've kept some notes on directory editing with Dired from those sessions here: <https://susam.net/cc/mastering-emacs/ch06.html#dired>.
Not to get too deep into this, but there’s this warm fuzzy feeling of not having to use /yet another different app/ that’s ever so slightly different to the optimal workflow you have otherwise
For example: I never thought of using total commander to augment some custom hotkey in vim. But in Emacs it’s just another set of functions available right there.
That does sound cool. Emacs sounds like the type of app I would have loved back when DOS was still a thing, but now after using linux for 20 something years, the fact that it can do everything just seems so antithetical to the unix way...even if I could see myself using it, the idea of being so dependent on one app for so much seems so weird to me these days. Guess I'll be sticking with vim and various cli tools until the end of time.
Emacs also eschews the "everything is a file" philosophy of unix (programs in emacs are just lisp functions) and the idea of storing / transmitting data as plain text, instead using lisp data structures to do that.
Lisp itself is kind of antithetical to the unix philosophy too when compared with C. Lisp is presents an extremely simple, totally consistent core that is extremely difficult to implement efficient compilers for. C on the other hand was designed from the outset with the goal of being easy to write compilers for. Requirements for having function prototypes ahead of uses, having all variables declared at the top of a function, etc were done to make it easier to implement. Almost a perfect example of worse is better, really.
Check out the unix hater's handbook if you haven't, that sums up pretty nicely the world that emacs hails from.
This also works globally with #'find-file-at-point (which isn't bound to a hotkey by default, but should be: this is one of my most satisfying hotkeys. That function opens any filepath appearing as a string, in any context, in the working directory of that context—filepath strings in files, and filepath strings as outputs from shell commands, being the top two).
(It's like converting every file reference into a clickable URL—only, implicitly).
;; In dired mode, visit the file at the cursor in the right/below/left/above window.
(defun my-dired-display-direction ()
(interactive)
(let* ((file-or-dir (dired-get-file-for-visit)) ;; get the file at cursor
(buffer (find-file-noselect file-or-dir))) ;; load the file into a buffer
(let ((window ;; figure out the window to use
(cond ((get-buffer-window buffer (selected-frame)))
((window-in-direction 'right)) ;; try window in each direction
((window-in-direction 'below)) ;; and default to right
((window-in-direction 'left)) ;; if no window found.
((window-in-direction 'above))
(t (split-window (selected-window) nil 'right)))))
(window--display-buffer buffer window 'window nil)
window)) )
;; Bind ctrl-o to display at direction.
(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "C-o") 'my-dired-display-direction)In Vim, I use vinegar, which bind the minus key to display the file's directory in netrw and in netrw, go up.
I want the cursor/focus to remain on the dired window so that I can go down the file list and see the file content on the other window. Ctrl-n and ctrl-o are all I need to do.
1: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wd...
Oil.nvim provides an incredible experience for managing files. It'll even use the LSP to fix imports if you move files from place to place.
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