![]() Dired as implemented in Emacs, showing multiple buffers with custom colors. | |
Developer(s) | Stan Kugell (original),Richard Stallman (forEmacs), Mike Lijewski, Stuart Cracraft (standalone Unix versions) |
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Initial release | Circa 1974; 51 years ago (1974) |
Stable release | |
Operating system | Unix-like,Microsoft Windows,macOS,Emacs |
Type | File manager |
License | GPL (Free software) |
Website | Mike Sperber's dired page |
Dired (forDirectory Editor) is acomputer program for editingfile systemdirectories. It typically runs inside theEmacstext editor as a specializedmode, though standalone versions have been written. Dired was thefirst[citation needed][discuss]file manager, or visual editor of file system information.[1][2][failed verification] The first version of Dired was written as a stand-alone program independently in 1972 byDave Lebling[3] atProject MAC, and circa 1974 byStan Kugell at theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).[1] It was incorporated intoGNU Emacs from the earliest versions,[4] and re-implemented inC andC++ on other operating systems.[5][6]
When run in Emacs, dired displays anls-like file listing in an Emacs buffer. The list can be navigated using standard navigation commands. SeveralEmacs Lisp scripts have been developed to extend Dired in Emacs. In combination with Tramp[7] it is able to access remote file systems for editing files by means ofSSH,FTP,telnet and many other protocols, as well as the capability of accessing local files as another user in the same session. There are also functions that make it possible to rename multiple files via Emacs search and replace capabilities[8] or applyregular expressions for marking (selecting) multiple files.[9] Once marked, files can be operated on in various ways from deleting, to renaming, to executing an external shell command or elisp function on them. By means of the Lisp package dired-x[10] it is also possible to handle existing ls-like directory listings in a virtual Dired mode. These can also be saved again, often using the filename extensiondired
.
Dired has a new command...
it is indisputable that both were inspired by an earlier stand-alone program running on Tenex available in the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) in 1978.
Historically, shortly after emacs "dired" appeared in the TECO implementation, a stand-alone version was written...