Dirvish

Wish you a better dired.

Introduction

Dirvish is a minimalistic file manager based on dired. This package tries to empower dired by giving it a modern user interface, in the meantime, preserves its customizability. Emacs users deserve a file manager that is even better than those popular ones such as ranger, vifm, lf since it is not limited to a terminal.

The name dirvish is a tribute to vim-dirvish.

Dependencies

PackageDescriptionRequired exaFor directory previewYes all-the-icons.elIcon supportOptional pdftoppmGenerate pdf preface imageOptional imagemagickGenerate image cacheOptional ffmpegthumbnailerGenerate video thumbnailerOptional epub-thumbnailerGenerate epub thumbnailerOptional zipinfoPreview zip filesOptional mediainfoShow information for audio filesOptional

Installation

Dirvish is available from Melpa.

For package.el user

You can install it directly via package-install if you have melpa in your package-archives.

For straight.el user

(straight-use-package 'dirvish)

Alternatively, install it by using use-package and straight in tandem.

(use-package dirvish
  :straight t)

Manual install

To install it manually, first clone this repository,

git clone https://github.com/alexluigit/dirvish

then add path/to/dirvish to your load-path.

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/dirvish")
(require 'dirvish)

Quickstart

After installation, just M-x and run dirvish.

Since dirvish-mode is just a major-mode derived from dired-mode, it respects all of your dired config (including keymapping) in principle.

As an example, here is an excerpt from my personal dired config:

(setq dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer t) ; added in emacs 28
(setq dired-clean-confirm-killing-deleted-buffers nil)
(setq dired-recursive-copies 'always)
(setq dired-recursive-deletes 'always)
(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t)
(setq dired-dwim-target t)
(setq dired-listing-switches "-AGhlv --group-directories-first --time-style=long-iso")

Features

File preview

When dirvish-enable-preview is non-nil, a preview window showing the content of selected file/directory will be displayed at right side of dirvish frame.

Debouncing

Reduce unnecessary UI redraw.

Navigate to a GIF file in Dirvish and check out the preview window.

A image cache file, with small filesize that is unlikely to block Emacs when rendering, is generated when the original image file is larger than 500KB.

A preview buffer is created either by an elisp function or by the help of a shell command. If you don’t like the way dirvish creates the preview buffer for certain file types, take a look at dirvish-preview-cmd-alist. This variable determines how a preview buffer get generated for different file types, customize it to suit your need. See Dirvish wiki_TODO for more details.

More intuitive file operation

Dired is superb, but from a modern file manager’s (like ranger, lf) perspective, it lacks some abilities when it comes file operation, such as:

• You can not mark files/directory across multiple dired buffers (by default)
• You can not paste/move files without specify the target directory explicitly (input in minibuffer)

Whereas with dirvish, you can:

• Marking files across multiple dirvish buffers
• Paste/move marked files/directory to current directory with one keystroke

Asynchronous I/O

To prevent emacs from getting freezes, dirvish uses external process to deal with heavy I/O task, such as file copy/move, directory preview, or image cache generation etc.

Bulit-in icon support

You don’t need all-the-icons-dired anymore since dirvish have built-in icon support. This native icon solution has several advantages over dired + all-the-icons-dired, those are:

• it handles line highlighting nicely (all-the-icons-dired doesn’t play well with hl-line-mode).
• it doesn’t render icon for all the files in a directory eagerly, instead it only render icons that are displayed within the viewport. (Try visiting /usr/bin or any directory with over 1000 files using both dirvish or dired + all-the-icons-dired to see the difference.)

“Dirvish-ish” dired

Usually dirvish takes up the whole frame, but sometimes we prefer managing files inside current window, just like how dired does it. To enable a single window dirvish, you can either:

Enable it once

(dirvish nil t)

Enable it automatically everytime you invoke dired-jump

(dirvish-override-dired-jump)

A glimpse of single-window dirvish:

Minibuffer file preview (extension)

dirvish-minibuffer-preview.el is an extension for dirvish, it provides dirvish-minibuf-preview-mode, which is a feature to preview file when narrowing file/directory candidates using minibuffer.

Why does this feature exist?

Dirvish and minibuffer seem unrelated at first glance. But when it comes to display a file preview, they actually share the same mechanism, that is: get file path under the cursor and update preview window accordingly. Displaying minibuffer file preview in a “dirvish” way, not only a lot of source code can be reused, but also related user configurations. In other words, you don’t have to configure file preview for dirvish and for minibuffer separately, they will always display the same thing.

For selectrum or vertico users (only support these 2 completion UIs for now), if you’d like to give this extension a try, all you need is:

(require 'dirvish-minibuffer-preview)
(dirvish-minibuf-preview-mode)

Check out this YOUTUBE_VIDEO_UPLOAD_TODO and Dirvish wiki_TODO for more details.

Configuration

See Dirvish wiki_TODO for all customization options.

Similar projects

Ranger.el

This package is inspired a lot by ranger.el, thanks @ralesi for bringing in ranger to emacs!

Although these 2 packages have something in common, unlike ranger.el, which tries to become an all-around emulation of ranger, dirvish is more bare-bone (roughly 1.2 kLOC), meaning it does NOT try to port all “goodness” from ranger. Instead, it only tries to:

• provides a better dired UI
• support preview for directory and common file types.
• improve some dired commands, make them more intuitive and accesible.

And here are some specific differences between dirvish and ranger.el:

• Highlight current line / Icons

  Ranger uses hl-line-mode to highlight current line, but this minor-mode doesn’t play very well with all-the-icons-dired-mode.

  Ranger + hl-line-mode + all-the-icons-dired-mode
  
  Dirvish
• Header display

  Ranger uses header-line-format to display its header, this approach leads to misaligned/mismatched header string when you have multiple parent windows. In contrast, dirvish uses posframe for that purpose.

  Ranger
  
  Dirvish
• Preview buffer

  Ranger uses dired for creating both parent buffers and directory preview buffer, which causes a lot of undesirable behaviours. Because when you have multiple ranger instance running, a ranger buffer can be both a parent buffer in INSTANCE-1 and a preview buffer in INSTANCE-2. In this case, update INSTANCE-1 inevitably mutate the state of INSTANCE-2, which is definitely not what we want.

  In ranger, it’s quite difficult to customize the setup of a preview buffer. The reason is, again, a preview buffer can either be a dired buffer or Non-dired buffer.

  To avoid this confusion, dirvish use external shell command (exa by default) for directory preview, so a preview buffer would never be a dired buffer. Also, you can customize the setup for preview buffer with dirvish-preview-setup-hook and dirvish-preview-cmd-alist.

• Keybindings

  Dirvish does not introduce any keybindings by default, see dirvish-mode-map for more details.

Neotree.el

Issues

• You may experience some issue with Windows since dirvish has not been tested on it
• It might have conflicts with packages that controls window placement.
• GIF may fail to play due to large filesize.

Feel free to report issues.

Copying

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.