Human-Readable Dired in Emacs

In emacs, dired defaults to

ls -al

format, but I would prefer

ls -alh

For example, I'd rather see this:

total 200M
drwx------ 2 jdm jdm 20K Mar 24 22:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 jdm jdm 52K Mar 21 03:04 ..
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 520K Mar 24 21:03 252.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.4M Mar 24 21:04 253.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.3M Mar 24 21:04 254.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.3M Mar 24 21:05 255.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.3M Mar 24 21:05 256.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.1M Mar 24 21:05 257.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1.1M Mar 24 21:06 258.jpg

as opposed to this:

total 204060
drwx------ 2 jdm jdm 20480 Mar 24 22:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 jdm jdm 53248 Mar 21 03:04 ..
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 532078 Mar 24 21:03 252.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1369711 Mar 24 21:04 253.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1285739 Mar 24 21:04 254.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1320355 Mar 24 21:05 255.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1328517 Mar 24 21:05 256.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1101028 Mar 24 21:05 257.jpg
-rw------- 1 jdm jdm 1077152 Mar 24 21:06 258.jpg

The fix was this line of Lisp added to the end of my .emacs file:

(setq dired-listing-switches "-alh")

Renaming a Pack-o-Files

A friend asked me a question that got me thinking that emacs must provide an easy way to rename a bunch of files in a directory from one thing to another. E.g., suppose I want to rename every file ending in .doc to a .tex extension. Point emacs at the directory, and type %m This fires off dired-mark-files-regexp, which selects files matching a regular expression. For the regular expression, try .doc$ Hit enter after each command. The '$' indicates that the pattern must occur at the end of a line. Now you can rename the marked files: %r This invokes dired-do-rename-regexp, which, for every marked file, asks what pattern to replace: doc$ It then asks what to change matching substrings to: tex ¡Voila! Much of the above is condensed from http://xahlee.org/emacs/find_replace_inter.html