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.

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.

It is highly recommended to install these dependencies to get the best preview experience:

• macOS

  brew install coreutils poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick gnu-tar unzip

• Debian

  apt-get install poppler-utils ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick tar unzip

• Arch

  pacman -S poppler ffmpegthumbnailer mediainfo imagemagick tar unzip

• … (help us to improving the list)

You may also want to check out the File preview section in Customizing.org.

After installation, let Dirvish take over Dired globally:

(dirvish-override-dired-mode)

• M-x dirvish gives you a 3-pane (parent+current+preview) session
• M-x dired | dired-jump | … gives you a “dirvish-ish” Dired buffer/session
• Press ? in a dirvish buffer to see the list of available commands

Now enjoy your brand-new Dired, or if you will, call it Dirvish 🐱.

• Customizing Dirvish
• Useful extensions
• FAQ | Related projects
• Changelog

Thanks Fox Kiester (@noctuid) for the awesome summary of Dirvish.

The name dirvish is a tribute to vim-dirvish.