jumping to a directory in speedbar

Question

Is there a way to jump to a given directory in speedbar?

For example, when I open up emacs and speedbar, it begins in ~/. Which is fine most of the time, but sometimes I'll want to jump to a remote system using tramp such as /sshx:raspberrypi:/home/raspberry. I'd like to make it easy to jump there.

One possible solution is to use a variation of the solution that Ren Wenshan proposed and add a hook to the start of speedbar-mode, but that only solves if I want to go to the same directory every time I start speedbar:

(add-hook 'speedbar-mode-hook
           (lambda ()
             (cd "/sshx:raspberrypi:/home/raspberry")))

Ideally there'd be a function I can call to just change the visible directory in speedbar.

Answer 1

The following function will update an open speedbar file/folder buffer with DIRECTORY being the top level. [At some point, it may be a good idea to add support to programmatically check to verify the speedbar buffer is in files mode ... at this time, there is no such check.]

(defun speedbar-jump-to-directory (&optional directory)
"Update the speedbar directory."
  (interactive)
  (let ((default-directory (if directory
                               (file-name-as-directory directory)
                               (file-name-as-directory
                                 (read-directory-name "DIRECTORY:  ")))))
    (speedbar-update-contents)))