Even more dired options

I've been posting a lot about dired lately, and with good cause. A lot of people say that org-mode is the killer app of Emacs, but dired should be in that group as well, especially if you count tramp as part of dired. Below, I'll list a few dired options in my config that deviate from the defaults.

dired-listing-switches

This is the essence of what dired presents and how it presents it. A great thing about it is that these are just the ls switches, so you can look them up with info ls.

(setq dired-listing-switches "-laGh1v --group-directories-first")

• l: Is the only mandatory one.
• a: Means to list invisible files.
• G: Don't show group information. These days, when there are more laptops than people, the group info is rarely useful.
• h: Human readable sizes, such as M for mebibytes.
• 1v: Affects the sorting of digits, hopefully in a positive way.
• --group-directories-first: self-explanatory, I like to have the directories on the top, separate from the files.

On recursion

(setq dired-recursive-copies 'always)
(setq dired-recursive-deletes 'always)

These settings make dired skip the confirmation when you copy or delete a directory that contains other directories. What's the worse that could happen, right?

-  rm -rf /usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg
+  rm -rf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg