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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dired Power

One thing which strikes you when using Emacs is how it is designed by programmers for programmers. And then some.

Small things which might require a whole series of actions in other editors or complete context switching to another application are too easy in Emacs.

Take for example, getting the file name putting it in the clipboard or another application.

In Dired, just hit 'w' and you will get the file name in the kill ring. Paste that into any other application. Just think of the effort required on a Windows machine!

Want the full path? No problem, hit '0 w' to get the absolute path.

Right, you want a bunch of file names to be copied? mark all the files with 'm' and then hit w or '0 w'. You will get a space separated list of names in the kill ring which you can paste into another buffer.

Go on, try it out. Invoke dired by M-x dired or C-x d.