A polished Dired with batteries included

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.

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

brew install coreutils fd poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick

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

pacman -S fd poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick tar unzip

pkg install gnuls fd-find poppler ffmpegthumbnailer ImageMagick7 gtar

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

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)

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.

• Customizing
• Extensions
• Related projects
• Changelog
• Absolute beginner’s guide
• Discussions

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.