🚀 go-pugleaf

Who has "the best" dired extensions?

I'm finally getting around to learning elisp (after over 3 years
as an emacs user), and it occurred to me that probably almost
every beginner must try to sharpen their skills by trying to
improve dired. As I look at the library of lisp programs
available as listed as available in the LCD-datafile supplied (by
Dave Brennan?), I see numerous references to dired.

For a while recently I was using the set of extensions written by
Chris Ward (according to line 3 of the copyright), which I liked
a lot at first, until I realized that several problems annoyed me
so much that I finally stopped using it, e.g., it _changes_ some
things from the way they are in the original, and even eliminates
some things (or so it seemed to me).  After 3 weeks of steady
use, I found I couldn't retrain my hands to press the right
buttons, so I busied myself with trying to patch it up to my own
taste, and also thought of a couple of things I'd like to add
myself.

Out of curiosity I made a buffer into which I poured dired.el and
also this new version, and did M-x occur on "defun", sort'ed and
uniq'ed the list, and found 120 functions defined between them.
I thought momentarily about merging these into the "ideal" dired
program, and then editing the keymap to my own liking, when it
dawned on me that probably 1000 people have already gone through
some similar exercise.

Therefore, I guess my question for the net is this: is there some
"ideal" dired package out there in ftp-land which already does
98% of the work for me?

And, if anybody happens to know, what work has already been done
on this for version 19?

Thanks for any advice.
--
=================================================================
Lynn D. Newton                | System Test
Motorola Core Engineering     | (Department of Heuristic Neology)
Tempe, AZ                     | "The bug stops here!"
(602) 438-3739                | 
lynn@jazz.phx.mcd.mot.com     |