And Sunrise Commander, the dual-pane dired that works even more like an orthodox file manager.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander

The name itself a reference to Midnight Commander, inspired by Norton Commander...

My favorite dired feature is that if you C-x C-q (the standard Emacs binding to toggle the read-only status of a file), it makes the directory buffer writable. You can then edit the buffer like a regular file, including changing file names (or symbolic link targets, or other things, I presume), and when you're done, C-c C-c and it applies all the changes as renamed files, symbolic link retargeting, etc etc. Very handy, since you can use all the usual Emacs features like query-replace or kmacros while doing it.

Ugh, I find dired incredibly annoying and avoid it at all costs in Emacs. You use it once and suddenly have a gazillion buffers open, it's just the worst! They don't even go away when you deliberately close them with q!

Of course, it can be customized.

     (put 'dired-find-alternate-file 'disabled nil)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer

This does not solve the issue, if you enter a folder with RET (a slightly more obvious key than `a`), it still opens a new buffer for every directory. What you would have to do is to remap the key in dired's keymap. Which still doesn't solve the issue that it keeps the buffer open even though you close it with `q`, which requires some other fix.

Or: you can use a file manager that isn't made by crazy people, which is what I do. I say this as a loyal Emacs user: there are so many things in Emacs that are amazing (org-mode and magit are the two famous ones obviously, but a personal favorite is Emacs calc, which is just a work of art), but dired is not one of them.

I wouldnt say dired is made by crazy people, It just doesnt fit your expectations

I like that it opens multiple windows it makes it easy to quickly jump between directories. I dont worry about having a clean list of buffers though but it never gets in my way

Why do you care about open buffers? When I first started using emacs I cared because other text editors force you to care by displaying "tabs" or the like for each open buffer. But emacs is better than that. The only time I ever see all open buffers is if I do M-x list-buffers, and I never do that. Other than that, open buffers never get in the way. I do use midnight-mode to kill all "old" buffers in the middle of the night to stop the memory usage growing indefinitely, though.

A buffer per directory is just the right thing for dired to do, for the same kind of reason that it is right that git has a staging area. Your problem is that this behaviour causes friction with how you prefer to manage buffers. Some suggestions:

- With the regular buffer list, if you keep typing letters, the view will restrict to buffers containing that string

- All the usual selection narrowing options, e.g. Helm, work here

- You can rebind 'q' to 'kill-buffer-and-its-windows

- A lot of people like ibuffer, which allows you to group kinds of buffer in its buffer list, e.g. all dired buffers