I am trying to use dired on Windows. But, when I attempt to follow a shortcut in dired, it seems to open the shortcut file itself in a buffer instead of following the shortcut to the target directory.

I attempted to follow the installation instructions in this file starting on line 51: https://github.com/hidsh/elisp/blob/master/w32-symlinks.el.

When I byte-compiled the w32-symlinks.el file, Emacs informed me that there were incorrectly escaped quotes in the function located on line 171. I removed those parts of the docstring and byte-compiled the file without error. I also used the following code as specified in the directions.

(add-hook 'dired-load-hook

(lambda () (require 'w32-symlinks)))

But, when I use dired to follow a Windows shortcut it still opens it as a file.

Is there another file explorer package that I can use? Is there another solution?

Thank you for your time.

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Edit 1:

I did end up making some progress. I deleted my configuration, reinstalled emacs, and then followed the instructions again. Emacs now starts with configuration choices related to the w32-symlinks package. I have tried a few different combinations. But, now when I attempt to use dired to open a windows shortcut I get the error “Wrong type argument: stringp, t” in the mini-buffer.

  • arthurno1@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    when I use dired to follow a Windows shortcut it still opens it as a file

    Have you enabled parsing of lnk files; as they say in the docs, you have:

     (customize-option 'w32-symlinks-handle-shortcuts)

    You can just

    (setopt w32-symlinks-handle-shortcuts t)

    However, when I tried it, they don’t seem to parse correctly the name; the last part of the name is surrounded by ‘#’ characters for some reason, so Emacs reports no such file found. I haven’t looked in depth at how they parse stuff and where.