Ugh, I find dired incredibly annoying and avoid it at all costs in Emacs. You use it once and suddenly have a gazillion buffers open, it's just the worst! They don't even go away when you deliberately close them with q!
(put 'dired-find-alternate-file 'disabled nil)
Or: you can use a file manager that isn't made by crazy people, which is what I do. I say this as a loyal Emacs user: there are so many things in Emacs that are amazing (org-mode and magit are the two famous ones obviously, but a personal favorite is Emacs calc, which is just a work of art), but dired is not one of them.
I like that it opens multiple windows it makes it easy to quickly jump between directories. I dont worry about having a clean list of buffers though but it never gets in my way
- With the regular buffer list, if you keep typing letters, the view will restrict to buffers containing that string
- All the usual selection narrowing options, e.g. Helm, work here
- You can rebind 'q' to 'kill-buffer-and-its-windows
- A lot of people like ibuffer, which allows you to group kinds of buffer in its buffer list, e.g. all dired buffers