A minor mode to make dired a bit more like ranger, but just crazy, not evil.

After enabling this mode, EVERY dired movement command, should preview the file or directory at point in other-window.

diranged aims to keep a preview for every motion command, regardless of what your dired-mode-map motion keys are bound to. If you find an edge-case - please let me know.

All keys should be consistent with dired-mode and standard Emacs bindings, with the exception of <SPC> and <backspace>, which will now scroll-other-window and scroll-other-window-down respectively.

Add diranged.el to your load-path, and then:

(require 'diranged)
(define-key dired-mode-map "r" 'diranged-mode)

Or to use it as the default way to navigate dired buffers:

(add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 'diranged-mode)

With use-package:

(use-package diranged
  :bind (:map dired-mode-map ("r" . diranged-mode)))

The following customisation options and their defaults are shown below:

(setq diranged-disable-on-quit t     ; disable diranged on quit-window
      diranged-kill-on-move t        ; cleanup spawed buffers as we go
      diranged-kill-on-exit t        ; cleanup spawed buffers on exit
      diranged-max-file-size 10      ; MB size limit for previewing files
      diranged-restore-windows t)    ; restore windows state on exit

Not evil enough for you? Take a look at ranger-mode

A very similar package exists called peep-dired, but this doesn’t quite cut the mustard IMHO since it only works for up and down lines with Ctrl-p/n or Up/Down and hasn’t been touched in nearly 5 years.