Dired Delight lets you tag files in Dired, Emacs’ file manager, with colors.

This affords a visual way – besides the filesystem tree – to group files, or persistently mark files needing action, find a specific file at a glance, etc… I think? (Honestly I’m not sure.)

• There are two supported styles for marking:

A block next to the file name (left), or highlighting (right). Both styles work with and without dired-hide-details-mode.

• Select colors with preview for marking:

• Works fine with Dirvish

Clone this repo or download its files and run M-x package-install-file on the directory.

(use-package dired-delight
  :straight (:host github :repo "karthink/dired-delight")
  :hook (dired-mode . dired-delight-mode)
  :bind (:map dired-mode-map
         ("@" . dired-delight)
         ("*c" . dired-delight-mark-color)))

(package-install 'quelpa-use-package)
(require 'quelpa-use-package)

(use-package dired-delight
  :quelpa (dired-delight :fetcher github :repo "karthink/dired-delight")
  :hook (dired-mode . dired-delight-mode)
  :bind (:map dired-mode-map
         ("@" . dired-delight)
         ("*c" . dired-delight-mark-color)))

1. Turn on dired-delight-mode in a Dired buffer.
2. Mark files (or not for a single file) and call dired-delight to tag marked files. To remove a tag don’t supply any color, i.e. leave it blank.
3. Call dired-delight-mark-color to mark all files that have a given color. You can then narrow the buffer to these files, or act on them in any of the usual ways.

The following keybindings may help:

(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "@") 'dired-delight)
(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "*c") 'dired-delight-mark-color)