8 Multiple Dired Directories and Non-Dired Commands

An Emacs buffer can have but one working directory, stored in the buffer-local variable default-directory. A Dired buffer may have several subdirectories inserted, but it still has only one working directory: that of the top-level Dired directory in that buffer. For some commands it is appropriate that they use the current Dired directory instead of default-directory, e.g., find-file and compile.

A general mechanism is provided for special handling of the working directory in special major modes:

default-directory-alist

Default: ((dired-mode . (dired-current-directory)))

Alist of major modes and their notion of default-directory, as a Lisp expression to evaluate. A resulting value of nil is ignored in favor of default-directory.

dired-default-directory

Use this function like you would use the variable default-directory, except that dired-default-directory also consults the variable default-directory-alist.