Open 4 or any number of files in rectangles (dired open all in splits)

Question

When you have a dired buffer open and it's listing 4 files in a directory, is there a way to 'open all' the files, and be able to see all the files as 4 split windows in emacs.

Answer 1

Yes.

1. In Dired, F (command dired-do-find-marked-files) displays and visits each of the marked files, or the next prefix-arg number of files. If you want to mark all of the files then you can use % m .. Or if no files are marked then you can just use t to mark them all.

2. If you use Dired+ then you can also just use prefix arg C-u C-u to act on all files (no need to mark them all). So just **C-u C-u F will do what you want.

3. If you use Dired+ then you can even do the same thing for all files in the current Dired buffer and in all marked subdirs, ... recursively. For that, you use key M-+ F instead of F. (All such recursive-behaving commands are on prefix key M-+.)

The number of files that can be displayed this way is restricted by the height of the current window and `window-min-height'. All of the files are visited, but some of them might not be displayed because there's not enough window space.

But you can also have F or M-+ F open the files in separate frames (any number of them), by setting or binding option pop-up-frames to non-nil.