how to produce a dired buffer listing all untracked files?

Question

git status tells me names of files that are currently untracked. How can I get a dired buffer containing those files? e.g. if I run the command git ls-files --others --exclude-standard, I'd like all of those files in a dired buffer?

Something like M-x find-dired would work, except I don't want the output of find, I need the output of the git command above.

Answer 1

I think this does what you want:

(defun my/dired-untracked (dir)
  (interactive "DUntracked in directory: ")
  (cd dir)
  (switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create "*untracked*"))
  (shell-command "git ls-files --others --exclude-standard | xargs ls -l" (current-buffer))
  (dired-mode dir)
  (set (make-local-variable 'dired-subdir-alist)
       (list (cons default-directory (point-min-marker)))))

It prompts for a directory, changes to the directory, runs the git command, and finally turns this into an actual dired buffer.

If you are using magit, however, it is much nicer to see all tracked and untracked files in the buffer created by magit-status. It doesn't behave like a dired buffer but you can visit and delete files from there as well.