dired-x: Virtual Dired
6 Virtual Dired
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Using “Virtual Dired” means putting a buffer with Dired-like contents in
Dired mode. The files described by the buffer contents need not
actually exist. This is useful if you want to peruse an ‘ls -lR’ output
file, for example one you got from an FTP server. You can use all
motion commands usually available in Dired. You can also use it to save
a Dired buffer in a file and resume it in a later session.
Type ‘M-x dired-virtual’ to put the current buffer into virtual Dired
mode. You will be prompted for the top level directory of this buffer,
with a default value guessed from the buffer contents. To convert the
virtual to a real Dired buffer again, type ‘g’ (which calls
‘dired-virtual-revert’) in the virtual Dired buffer and answer ‘y’. You
don’t have to do this, though: you can relist single subdirectories
using ‘l’ (‘dired-do-redisplay’) on the subdirectory headerline, leaving
the buffer in virtual Dired mode all the time.
The function ‘dired-virtual-mode’ is specially designed to turn on
virtual Dired mode from the ‘auto-mode-alist’. To edit all ‘*.dired’
files automatically in virtual Dired mode, put this into your
‘~/.emacs’:
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("[^/]\\.dired$" . dired-virtual-mode)
auto-mode-alist))
The regexp is a bit more complicated than usual to exclude ‘.dired’
local-variable files.
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