How Dired works

Dired displays the content of the directory based on the result returned from ls command (of course, I’m talking about Unix-based system, not Windows). We can customize the way it displays by adding some more arguments for the ls command.

Prepare ls program

If you are using a GNU Linux based OS, everything is just simple. The GNU version of ls has many options for you to play with and you can skip to the next part.

Unfortanately, the MacOS version doesn’t. But don’t worry, you can install the GNU one from Macports. If you haven’t installed MacPorts yet, take a look at this article. After finishing installing MacPorts, open up terminal and install coreutils and findutils by this command

$ sudo port install coreutils findutils

If you want to use those GNU version commands, eg ls, cp, chmod, etc, in terminal, add this to your .bash_profile or .zshrc

$ export PATH=/opt/local/libexec/gnubin:$PATH:

After that, restart terminal and type this command to test

$ where ls

If you see this path /opt/local/libexec/gnubin/ls in the output result, congratulation, you have installed it successfully.

Before you proceed to the next part, you need to config Dired to use your newly installed ls program, not the default one in MacOS. Add this to your .emacs

(require 'ls-lisp)
(setq ls-lisp-use-insert-directory-program t)
(setq insert-directory-program "/opt/local/libexec/gnubin/ls")

Customize Dired mode with ls command

The last step is to config Dired mode. You need to tell Dired to add more arguments to the ls call so that it can display correctly. The library called dired-sort-map, which you can find here, call help you achieve that task. Download the dired-sort-map.el file from the link above, put it in your .emacs.d folder or somewhere that Emacs can find it in the load path and add this to your .emacs

(require 'dired-sort-map)

The variable dired-listing-switches specifies the extra argument that you want to pass to ls command. For example, calling ls –group-directories-first will result in ls sort the directories first in the output. To let Emacs pass that argument to ls, use this code

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

You can add more arguments that you like, in that case the code will look like this

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

That means calling ls with the arguments –group-directories-first, -a, -l, -h arguments.

Some of the arguments that you might be interested in:

-a: list all files
-h, –human-readable: with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-l: use a long listing format
–group-directories-first: group directories before files
-X: sort alphabetically by entry extension
-U: do not sort; list entries in directory order
-t: sort by modification time, newest first
-S: sort by file size

For more arguments, simply open terminal and type

$ ls --help

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