dired-auto-readme VS .emacs.d

Simplest and narutal is to display three different windows; hide scrollbars and you will be left with very thin line (1 pixel wide) between windows. Alternatively you can do some tricks to work around the issue similar as to what org-mode does, or something similar as to what I do in dired-auto-readme. I don't suggest since you will be fighting Emacs, and there are many issues and problems with what org or my package do. There is a reason why org uses src_blocks, and while org is great and do awesome job at what it does, there are still issues that are not easily overcome when you scratch under the surface (for example font-lock is in certain cases spooking, you don't have major/minor mode maps in src blocks, eldoc is not working properly etc.

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.

I wrote a little addon to dired to automatically display readme files in directories if there is one. I use it all the time, autoloads with my dired. I also wrote an init file generator and manager that I use every day, as long as some small packages to cleanup org mode noise, summarized in org-view-mode. Generally I use elisp instead of bash to cleanup directories, batch rename files in some special folders according to some specific naming rules etc. I also wrote an elisp script to re-build emacs, lots of other small stuff I haven't published on my github. You can check here some small extras I wrote or adapted from others for my personal use.

If you need some example of using text properties, here is some of my code, not sure if it is very good example, but it is very short and hopefully easy to understand. Here is a bit more elaborated one, and here is a bit of unorthodox usage of Emacs, also using text properties to achieve the effect. I don't recommend anything for "stable" system, beside org-view-mode, rest are just experiments and idea tests.

I have just reworked dired-auto-readme, fixed some bugs and made it aware of org-view-mode, so now it is possible to see readme files written in org mode without markup in Dired buffers. For example, here is a screenshot of org-tree-slide package by T. Ishikawa, cloned from his GitHub repo.

My goal is to create a clean and minimal viewer, org-view-mode, which will generally hide everything but text and put org file in read only mode. I need it for my dired-auto-readme. In general, when I read other people's stuff, I don't care about their markup, I am just interested about the content. I don't understand why is there no such mode from the beginning.

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.