dired-gitignore

dired minor mode to ignore files that are to be ignored by git.

Purpose

Sometimes the working copy directories of your git repos get flooded with temporary files, log files, cache stuff – in short files not belonging to the repo and ignored by git. At those times you might wish for a convenient way to hide those files in your dired buffer. If yes, dired-gitignore is for you.

Hide and show the gitignored files by a simple configurable keystroke.

Installation

Easiest way to install is from MELPA. If you have configured the MELPA sources you can just install the dired-gitignore package using the package-install command.

You can of course also use straight.el. Put the following lines into your startup file.

(straight-use-package
 '(dired-gitignore :type git :host github :repo "johannes-mueller/dired-gitignore.el"))

Usage

Just bind the command (dired-gitignore-global-mode) to some key of your choice. For example by putting something like

(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "h") #'dired-gitignore-global-mode)

into your startup files. Then you will hide and show the gitignored files in a dired buffer by hitting the H key.

If you want to ignore gitignored files by default add also

(dired-gitignore-global-mode t)

Status

It started off as a rainy Sunday afternoon hack. Although it matured in some way over more than two years, probably not everything will work under any circumstances. Bug reports and feedback welcome in the issue tracker. Pull requests also, of course. In the meantime it turns out to be quite stable, as it does not seem to cause any trouble.

Limitations / Caveats

A standard UNIX shell is required for dired-gitignore.el to work. If you experience issues with the standard shell you are using you might consider setting the shell-file-name variable to /bin/bash or so to change it.

Alternatives

There is a way more sophisticated package dired-filter.el of the dired-hacks suite. It can do things like this one and many more. So if you have more complicated needs regarding filtering in dired this might be a better bet for you. However, dired-filter.el is also more complex, it has more than 1200 lines of code plus some heavy dependencies as opposed to less than 100 in dired-gitignore with dired as only dependency.

Credits

This package has been inspired by dired-hide-dotfiles.