.emacs.d VS dired-hacks

In my Helm, I have to actively choose the candidate to confirm it. So I can type in both paths that are shorter or longer then existing ones. I even made a video to demonstrate it, the thread was relatively recently up I think. My Helm setup is here it if helps you, find Helm in the list of packages.

I also use Helm, and I have no problems. Just keep typing, once you typed a letter that does not exist in a path name it will stop completing. I don't know if I have some special option enabled/disabled; I don't think you need it, but you can see my Helm config (just scroll down untill you find "Helm").

When all deps are installed,my config is over 200 packages. On my Arch Linux desktop I built in 2016, with i7 4.6k (haswell) it starts ~0.7 secs, but init time will be anything between 0.5 ~ 0.8 secs, i guess depending on what system does. So all things same, init time will vary.

I am using it in my literate org-config. If you scroll down, there is a big list of packages, and I have done a small wrapper around helm-imenu, to jump to a package configuration. Looks like this.

That does not work for completions, at least not for me. It works for keymaps, so you can have mode specific (or really any) keymap in src blocks. I have been using his method myself in my init file generator for quite a while now. If you (or anyone) knows/have an idea how to expand it for completions and eldoc, I would be really happy to hear.

I don't know what if it is more robust but I use more or less plain dired with just some options turned on to make it less noisy to look at, but I don't "manage" my files so much to be honest. I do use some extras from dired-hacks, and my own dired-auto-readme, but that is about it. You can check my setup if you wish, look at "dired" under packages and in Lisp folder for "dired-extras.el".

I personally put all custom lisp in a special directory and scrape autoloads myself. If you are curious, you can check under "generator", functions generate-autoloads and collect-autoloads, but there is nothing special, just plain text search and copy-paste programmatically. I don't recommend to use it though.

I have used Clemeras dired-git-info for a while, but it does not work well with my dired-auto-readme and dired-subtree from dired-hacks due to use of overlays.

beacon which-key auto-package-update dired-hacks helm

As an alternative to do stuff manually as Prot does, you can also take a look at dired-hacks by Goljer, a.k.a Fuco, in particular dired-subtree and dired-filter. Dired-subtree let's you "toggle" directory listings displayed inline, similar as how other file managers expand/collapse directories in "list-mode". If you prefer using Dired interactively, that one is a game changer in my opinion. I have 'dired-subtree-toggle' on a tab key, so I can just quickly press tab to "expand/collapse" a folder. it is not same as pressing 'i' in Dired and having content of a directory inserted "below", but in my opinion, I never find the built-in Dired version very appealing. Subtree-toggle also skips extra headers for inserted directories, and I can still do all dired operations on directories as if they were inserted with built-in method that Prot demonstrates. I have also used dired-subtree-toggle to make three small functions on top of it to expand entire directory tree one folder at a time, all at once and to collapse them.

On a similar note, dired-ranger has some awesome copy/paste/move functions.

I personally use just Dired, styled with some addons and a simple script where I use dired-subtree to expand/fold subdirectories one level at the time. You can use dired-subtree to expand one directory at a time.

dired-subtree (from dired-hacks) - hit tab on a directory and expand/fold the subtree;

If you are using dired-hacks, it comes with something called dired-subtree.