3.1 Omitting Variables

The following variables can be used to customize omitting.

dired-omit-mode

Default: nil

If non-nil, “uninteresting” files are not listed. Uninteresting files are those whose files whose names match regexp dired-omit-files, plus those ending with extensions in dired-omit-extensions. C-x M-o (dired-omit-mode) toggles its value, which is buffer-local. Put

(dired-omit-mode 1)

inside your dired-mode-hook to have omitting initially turned on in every Dired buffer (see Installation). You can then use C-x M-o to unomit in that buffer.

To enable omitting automatically only in certain directories you can add a directory local setting (see Directory Variables in The Gnu Emacs manual) for Dired mode

((dired-mode . ((dired-omit-mode . t))))

to a .dir-locals.el file in that directory. You can use the command add-dir-local-variable to do this.

dired-omit-files

Default: "^#\\|\\.$"

Files whose names match this buffer-local regexp will not be displayed. This only has effect when dired-omit-mode’s value is t.

The default value omits the special directories . and .. and autosave files (plus other files ending in .) (see Omitting Examples).

dired-omit-extensions

Default: The elements of completion-ignored-extensions, dired-latex-unclean-extensions, dired-bibtex-unclean-extensions and dired-texinfo-unclean-extensions.

If non-nil, a list of extensions (strings) to omit from Dired listings. Its format is the same as that of completion-ignored-extensions.

dired-omit-localp

Default: no-dir

The localp argument dired-omit-expunge passes to dired-get-filename. If it is no-dir, omitting is much faster, but you can only match against the non-directory part of the file name. Set it to nil if you need to match the whole file name or t to match the file name relative to the buffer’s top-level directory.

dired-omit-marker-char

Default: C-o

Temporary marker used by Dired to implement omitting. Should never be used as marker by the user or other packages. There is one exception to this rule: by adding

(setq dired-mark-keys "\C-o")
;; i.e., the value of dired-omit-marker-char
;; (which is not defined yet)

to your ~/.emacs, you can bind the C-o key to insert a C-o marker, thus causing these files to be omitted in addition to the usually omitted files. Unfortunately the files you omitted manually this way will show up again after reverting the buffer, unlike the others.