Tell find-name-dired to only show filenames - emacs

Is there any way to make find-name-dired to only show filenames that I can move through and select? I have a lot of files that are buried in subdirectories, and I don't want it to print out the entire subdirectory every time it finds a file.

Two problems with this:
How would you distinguish between two files with the same file name in different directories?
Dired needs the full path in order to be able to do anything with that file.
You could deal with (2) by using text properties or overlays to hide the directories, but due to (1) I really couldn't recommend that.
Edit: to otherwise customise the output of dired to reduce unwanted noise you can use Dired Details (optionally with Dired Details Plus)
How do I hide number of links in dired?
Emacs dired: too much information

Related

purpose of ~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/

A directory titled auto-save-list appeared in my .emacs.d folder. In my init.el file, I did not explicitly mention I want this folder to be made. What is the purpose of this folder? I noticed it seems to always be empty: files being auto-saved (starting with #) appear wherever the original file being edited is, not in the auto-save-list directory.
If you search the manual or its index for auto-save-list you will find:
Emacs records information about interrupted sessions in files named
‘.saves-PID-HOSTNAME’ in the directory ‘~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/’.
This directory is determined by the variable
‘auto-save-list-file-prefix’. If you set ‘auto-save-list-file-prefix’
to ‘nil’, sessions are not recorded for recovery.
– C-hig (emacs)Recover RET
I did not explicitly mention I want this folder to be made.
Emacs and elisp libraries in general write to ~/.emacs.d/ when they need to save data. That's one of the purposes of this directory -- to provide a common place for such files to be written to; and this typically happens without asking explicit permission (although it's also pretty common for you to be able to customize the filename in question if you so wish).
phils already answered the specific question, but to answer the more general question of what to do about miscellaneous files automatically created by Emacs, check out the no-littering package.
Auto save files (the ones with '#') are not handled by no-littering, but the readme gives a work around for those if you wish.

Emacs: How to associate different initialization configurations with different file formats?

What's the best way to associate file extensions with my own customizations? For example, when I open a .py file the frame would be bigger and split into 2 windows, but when a .tex file is opened the frame would be smaller with just one window. Should I split my .emacs and write all configurations associated with python in a .el file (key bindings, python shell = ipython, etc ...) and for latex in another .el file (load auctex, pdf mode = default, etc ...)? How would I "call" the files and make them work appropriately (if that'a possible and good solution)?
(First, +1 to #phils's comment. You will get better help if you are more specific about what you need/want.)
Depending on just what you need/want, see also variable (not option) file-name-handler-alist. You might not need it, but you might.
You can make use of it if you intend all or particular operations on the files to involve additional actions (such as those you describe). For any operations where you do not need special treatment, just provide the default behavior. For the others, provide the default behavior plus the extra behavior (in whichever order is appropriate).
See (elisp) Magic File Names for more information.

Ignore ELPA files in recentf

I update from ELPA/MELPA regularly. Unfortunately, the files the Emacs package manager manipulates show up in my recentf list, basically making it useless since it's always full from whatever files were updated, and not files that I actually care about. How can I fix this?
See user options recentf-exclude, recentf-keep, recentf-auto-cleanup, and command recentf-cleanup.
The first two options let you exclude and include files that satisfy certain predicates or whose names match certain patterns, respectively.

Dired invert selection

I want to mark all files currently unmarked and simultaneously unmark all marked files. How do I do it?
Let's say I have a directory with *.png and and other formats. I want to filter only PNGs. Say, I did: % d.png and now want to select the rest, but not the PNG?
If you used %d to select the files (dired-flag-file-deletion), they are considered
flagged, not marked. To mark files, you may use %m (dired-mark). The command t toggles the marked files (dired-toggle-marks); this was mentioned by event_jr's answer. To convert files from flagged to marked, use the command *cD* (dired-change-marks).
It seems the only command that operates on flagged files is x, which deletes them (dired-do-flagged-delete). The same can be achieved on marked files with D (dired-do-delete), and you can do much more on marked files, such as R (dired-do-rename). So apparently the only advantage of flagging are the convenient commands to flag "garbage" files, which you may use and then convert the flags to marks anyway.
t .................................... for toggle

Emacs and cscope with multiple directories

How do I set up cscope in Emacs when my source code lives in multiple directories?
Say I have several paths for my C++ project:
/path/to/my/code (and subdirectories)
/path/to/other/code (and subdirectories)
/path/to/static/linking/include/files (and subdirectories)
/path/to/static/linking/lib/files' (and subdirectories)
I would like to use xcscope to navigate/look up symbols in my code and the library that I am linking to.
The instructions for xcscope.el say that I should first run C-c s (Cscope->Create list and index) at /path/to/my/code, but I am then confused about how I to have the other paths indexed by cscope.
The documentation says I should go to the other directories and run cscope -b, but what I am supposed to do after that?
I looked at the cscope.files file that C-c s built. I think I am supposed to add my other paths to this file, but this file includes a list of source code files (not directories).
Do I have to manually edit cscope.files to add every single file that I want to index that is outside of my project's root directory?
The documentation is confusing.
I got one sol'n from http://cscope.sourceforge.net/large_projects.html. Still confusing.
cscope.files is aptly named. It is NOT directories. It is files, only files. Which is as daunting as it sounds. What if you have hundreds of files. Then you have to write hundreds of lines, one per file, into cscope.files. No joke.
Automate it with some scripting. E.g., on linux, use bash scripts and redirection (>,>>,|) operators to select and filter files from any and all directories into that cscope.files.
What about the directory where cscope.files resides? IF you don't include those files, it'll only find them when you open your project (in emacs, but probably applicable to any IDE) in that source directory. So, include them, too, for easy opening of your project from anywhere.
The option "recursive/-R" seems obvious to send to cscope-indexer. Nope, not with many root directories. Does nothing (probably could do something with scripts or elisp or who knows). Just feed those files, absolute path, into cscope.files. And you might have to make sure you have only one cscope.files per project. Don't split them up relative to each diretory. Or maybe you can, something to look into.
Remember, include the /path/to/each/file/ before the file if you want cscope.files to point to it from anywhere. cscope isn't "smart", it's dumb, it just takes directions for where to look and it won't know where to look for "filename", without knowing where it is. You're just asking it to call locate filename, which it can't do anyway, when you give it a lonely filename without a dir path outside of the directory that a particular cscope.files resides.
I hope there's a way to use xcscope inside emacs, just adding directories which it will catalog and index, as the xcscope docs and emacs menu suggest. But I didn't succeed in making it work that way.
Wouldn't a soft link (ln -s) work? Worked for me.