If you install the package dired-narrow (one of several neat packages described on the dired-hacks github page), then you can type filter strings to dynamically filter down a dired listing to match the filter.
For example, in the animation below I have a dired buffer containing lots of files. I invoke dired-narrow by hitting / and then type “png” to narrow to filenames matching “png”. I then hit RET to complete the filtering. At that point I can operate on the filtered dired list as I would for any dired buffer. I can even narrow further by simply invoking dired-narrow again and typing a new filter (I use “mirror” in the example below). Once I have finished with the filter, I hit g to revert back to the full directory listing.
As an aside, I have started using use-package to install and configure packages (see the update on this page). Here is the code I use to install and set up dired-narrow.
;;narrow dired to match filter (use-package dired-narrow :ensure t :bind (:map dired-mode-map ("/" . dired-narrow)))
Pragmatic Emacs 
Cool, thanks for the tip!
I had to add a (use-package dired) or else I got “Symbol’s value as variable is void: dired-mode-map”.
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Oops, never mind. I just did a ‘cask update’ and the problem went away. This included ‘use-package 20160204.1100 -> 20160226.1618’, so I guess that was it…?
Thanks again!
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Yes – I think the :map option was added in a very recent version of use-package
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In the video for dired-hacks there is a gold colored area of the mode line which is indicating the current object size. Is this part of the powerline library? Maybe just the coloring is from powerline?
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This is using the spaceline package. Try using this code
(use-package spaceline-config
:ensure spaceline
:config
(spaceline-emacs-theme))
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