Case-Insensitive Sorting in Dired on OS X

I like my dired directory listings to be sorted by name regardless of case. This was a bit fiddly to get working in OS X, but I found a solution using the built-in ls-lisp with a few extra options, rather than the system ls to generate the dired listing.

Here are the required settings:

;; using ls-lisp with these settings gives case-insensitve
;; sorting on OS X
(require 'ls-lisp)
(setq dired-listing-switches "-alhG")
(setq ls-lisp-use-insert-directory-program nil)
(setq ls-lisp-ignore-case t)
(setq ls-lisp-use-string-collate nil)
;; customise the appearance of the listing
(setq ls-lisp-verbosity '(links uid))
(setq ls-lisp-format-time-list '("%b %e %H:%M" "%b %e  %Y"))
(setq ls-lisp-use-localized-time-format t)

One downside of this is that it breaks dired-quick-sort, but I can live with that.

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Set up a shortcut to insert a symbol

Despite living in the UK I am hard-wired from some years spent in the US to use a US keyboard layout. One problem for me is that these keyboards do not have a £ symbol on them. On a Mac, I can insert a £ using OPTION-3 but not in Emacs since I have OPTION set to META. This is easily addressed with a bit of code

(define-key global-map (kbd "C-c M-3") (lambda () (interactive) (insert "£")))

Now C-c M-3 will insert the £ symbol. N.B. I could have just bound this to M-3 to match the behaviour elsewhere on my Mac, but I already use that for something else!