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