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Comment by turboponyy | Hacker News Reader

"Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" - some Emacs user, probably

I don't use emacs so I may not be familiar with the full power, but if you are referring to dired, I think oil.nvim is much, much more powerful than dired.

The major difference being that you still need to learn some new keybinds for dired, for example, you can't just create a file by editing the text buffer whereas in oil.nvim (and by extension, voil) your text editing skills immediately apply.

You can switch to wdired and then edit the filenames etc. But true you can't create/delete files. Creating empty files is rarely useful or necessary, though, so not sure why you'd want that. Deleting files is more useful but that seems perfect in normal dired as you can see what you've marked rather than try to mentally keep track of lines you've already deleted.

> Creating empty files is rarely useful or necessary

I kind of disagree? Most files were once created as an empty file! (at least that's the case in my workflow).

I've always just used `:e <filename>` - never saw the appeal of oil.nvim for that use case. But for other kinds of modifications it's nifty.

The normal pattern, in Unix-like systems at least, is to just write to a non-existent file. There is very little reason to create an empty file first.

In Emacs I can even open a file in a non-existent directory and it will create all the containing directories when I try to save. So I rarely even use mkdir.

Was literally thinking the same thing. A colleague of mine basically used emacs as an operating system. Pretty sure he could get his to make buttered toast.

Some vim user too! oil.nvim is a pretty popular package that does this.

I obviously love oil.nvim and that's why I ported it to vscode. But I think in some ways voil is even more powerful than oil. Specifically:

- It can work across multiple vscode windows

- The top line (that shows the current directory) can be used to filter files. For example, if you add "*.{txt,md}" to the end of that line, it will only show the txt and markdown files.

- The ability to defined custom shell commands and bind keybindings to them. For example, I can create a command that zips selected files and run it with a single keybinding in voil.

- Undo functionality

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