COMPARISON.org

Generally speaking, Dirvish should be able to handle most of the file exploring/managing tasks, after all it is backed by the superb Dired. Besides, choose Dirvish over packages listed below gives you:

1. An unified user interface in all your file managing scenarios.
2. File preview at your disposal.
3. Less package configs to maintain or worry about.

neotree

neotree works pretty well as a simple project explorer. But sadly, compare to dirvish[-side], this package is not built on top of Dired, which means you have to learn or configure a different set of commands, meanwhile, it is way less powerful as Dired/Dirvish in terms of file managing.

treemacs

Same as neotree, but treemacs is a much more mature yet complex package. It can even be used as a general rendering backend of any tree-like structures, you may find this package useful when you have related needs. It might be an overkill for simple project exploring tasks due to its complexity and huge codebase.

dired-sidebar

dired-sidebar, which is also a file explorer at side window that leveraging the power of Dired, is a promising alternative to dirvish-side. The problem with dired-sidebar is that all the niceities this package provided are only applied to the side Dired instance, one needs to do some extra works to make the regular Dired and dired-sidebar look consistent.

ranger.el

See this discussion.

all-the-icons-dired

I’d advise against using this package (all-the-icons-dired) along with Dirvish. The reason is that it trys to retrive icons for all the files in a directory eagerly, which hangs up Emacs on large directories. Dirvish, on the contrary, renders UI elements (including icons of course) lazily whenever applicable.

treemacs-icons-dired

Apart from similar concerns mentioned in the above all-the-icons-dired.el section, this package (treemacs-icons-dired) also introduces duplicate icon columns in Dirvish on spacemacs. A workaround can be found here.

dired-hacks

dired-ranger

The dirvish-yank/move command can do similar things as dired-ranger-move/paste, meanwhile, it has serveral benefits over dired-do-copy or dired-ranger:

• It paste/move files using external processes, hence heavy I/O tasks won’t block the main process of Emacs.
• It’s much simpler than dired-ranger because you mark files using inbuilt Dired commands such as dired-mark, dired-mark-extension, to name a few.

dired-subtree

Comparing with dired-subtree, dirvish-subtree has several advantages:

• Small code base: only 300+ lines
• Way Faster: expands a directory with 50000+ entries almost instantly
• Provides the subtree-state attribute
• Consistency: respects dired-actual-switches

dired-filter

dired-filter extends the filtering system of Dired on two aspects:

1. Introduces the “filter-stack” concept after ibuffer

   Dirvish has no plan on implementing the ibuffer like “filter-stack” because IMO the Dired marking system plus different dired-listing-switches covers almost all the possible file filtering needs. In terms of filtering files matching multiple criterias, you can always mark files using various dired-mark-* commands and kill the rest lines. This also makes dirvish-emerge.el a relatively small codebase.

2. Allows users to group files via various criteria

   Dirvish implements the second feature as dirvish-emerge-mode. It works in a similar way as dired-filter-group-mode along with several improvements:

   • File line indexing and reordering happened in one pass (~ 3x faster)
   • Manage groups using transient menu (dirvish-emerge-menu)
   • Respect configurations in dir-locals.el

dired-narrow

• dirvish-narrow has (optional) orderless integration
• dirvish-narrow does not show results from subtrees because it can be confusion sometimes

Other than these, dired-narrow and dirvish-narrow works pretty much the same.

dired-collapse

In short, the collapse attribute in Dirvish does it much faster and less invasive.

Let’s say you have a file ~/foo/bar/baz. After you enter the ~/ directory and enable dired-collapse-mode, the line previously displaying the directory foo not only reads as foo/bar/baz, but also points to the file ~/foo/bar/baz, because dired-collapse replace the old file names with the collapsed ones by modifying the buffer content. This behavior is quite invasive because it deprives user’s ability to access the original file foo. Namely, when you call dired-do-delete on that line, the file being deleted is ~/foo/bar/baz instead of ~/foo. This file name replace approach also leads to this weird behavior.

The collapse attribute in Dirvish never touch the buffer content, it only act as a visual indicator for files that has unique nested paths.

find-dired | fd-dired

Dirvish has no plan to support find-dired or fd-dired since we have the far better option dirvish-fd. The advantages of using dirvish-fd over find/fd-dired including but not limited to:

1. File preview works for dirvish-fd as well.
2. dirvish-fd-switches-menu allows us to change the fd flags interactively.
3. dirvish-quicksort and dirvish-ls-switches-menu also works in the result buffer of dirvish-fd.
4. The result buffer of dirvish-fd is added to Dirvish’s local history, which means commands like dirvish-history-go-forward/backward works seamlessly with dirvish-fd.

   …

dired-git-info | diff-hl | dired-k

The vc-state and git-msg attributes in Dirvish can achieve the same functionality without sacrificing performance. Meanwhile, these packages doesn’t mesh well with dirvish-subtree nor dired-subtree.

dired-rsync

dirvish-rsync command has feature parity of dired-rsync. A exclusive feature in dirvish-rsync is that it can collect all marked files across different Dired buffers as the source files.