Dired going Up Directories

Now dired is becoming more ingrained into my muscle memory, navigating efficiently through the folder structure is becoming more prominent in my mind and it still doesn’t feel natural enough.

I now don’t even think about using C-x d and the Enter key is fine for either opening a file or traversing into a directory. But what about moving up a directory!, also a very common action.

The default defined key is ^ and actually isn’t too bad and almost feels quite natural, almost…

Currently to traverse windows and buffers I am using the M key with comfortable key navigation hand positions as I am using these all the time. I feel like traversing up a directory should have the same feeling, and now I think about it, getting a feel for a hand position and hence an instinctual interaction with the keyboard is almost what emacs is all about (apart from the idea of extension by macros). Anyways, I digress…

What I would like to achieve is a quick command, no more than I am currently using for my window/buffer navigation, so a quick M and another key, one that makes sense and is sensible. So that is why I think I will have to discount the default ^ as it involves the shift key and actually trying to reach the tilda/6 key doesn’t feel that comfortable.

Hence I present the following:

(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "M-u") 'dired-up-directory)

The hand position is very comfortable, it fits in with the rest of my window navigation keys and u could very well mean up!

But there is something left, something that doesn’t feel right, or natural… and that is switching to dired from a file. Now I have this new defined key to traverse up a directory I have a general feeling that I should be using the same defined key to show dired from when I am visiting a file in a buffer. It is very odd… I can’t explain it, it just feels natural.

If it feels right then I am just going to go ahead and do it, I think the best method is probably to define a macro as thus:

(global-set-key (kbd "M-u") 'file-up-dir)

(fset 'file-up-dir
 (kmacro-lambda-form [?\C-x ?d return ] 0 "%d"))

The macro is just calling dired and then return to action the current directory. That is all I really want to do and for some reason in my own mind I seem to have extrapolated a file to be floating above / or below a directory so it almost makes sense to “go up” a directory to show the directory and hence dired