Open Dired From Shell

I was browsing the interwebs this morning, looking for a way to open a Dired buffer of the current finder window. There is a lot on going the other way, from Emacs to the Finder, but nothing from the Finder to Emacs. I got this from Fortune Datko:

Add this to your shell rc file (in my case, .zshrc):

# open a dired window for the current directory
dired() {
    emacsclient -e "(dired \"$PWD\")"
}

Then, assuming that Emacs server is running, type “`dired`” in the shell, and a Dired buffer of that directory opens in the current Emacs frame.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered what typing “`emacsclient -c .`” would do. It opens a dired buffer in a new frame. I have a shell script called “ec” that starts a new emacs client, but it’s easy to do it with a zsh alias:

alias ec="emacsclient -c -a ''"

This starts a server if there is not one already, then opens a new client. So, typing `ec .` should then open a Dired buffer in a new frame.