A Zoomed in vc dir for the Current Directory in dired

I almost always reach for project-vc-dir when I want a VC status overview, and most of the time this is exactly what I want, the whole project laid out in one buffer, every modified, added and unregistered file in the repo sitting right there, ready to be diffed or committed. But every so often, particularly when I am deep inside a big repository and I only really care about a single subdirectory's worth of changes, that project-wide view is, frankly, a bit too much. Too many rows, too much scrolling, too much noise.

So, what am I actually after?, I want the same vc-dir buffer, but scoped to whatever directory I happen to be looking at, most commonly the directory I have open in dired. And it turns out this is almost trivially easy in vanilla Emacs.

The bit I had not initially appreciated is that vc-dir itself already accepts a directory argument, it is the interactive prompt that steers you towards the repo root, because it defaults to (vc-root-dir) rather than default-directory. If you call it non-interactively with a subdirectory instead, the Git backend quite happily scopes the status listing to files underneath that path, even though the overall VC root is still the same project root.

So the fix is a tiny wrapper that just hands vc-dir the current default-directory and skips the prompt entirely:

(defun my/vc-dir-here ()
  "Run vc-dir on the current directory (dired's dir when called from dired)."
  (interactive)
  (vc-dir default-directory))

Then, because the main place I actually want this is from within dired, a keybinding that sits nicely alongside the standard C-x v family:

(with-eval-after-load 'dired
  (define-key dired-mode-map (kbd "C-x v D") #'my/vc-dir-here))

The mnemonic, such as it is, is that C-x v d is the normal vc-dir binding with its usual prompt, and capital D is the "here, right now, this directory" variant. Lowercase for the prompted version, uppercase for the zoomed-in one, which also pairs up nicely in my head with project-vc-dir being the zoomed-out project-wide thing on C-x p v.

So the little two-tier workflow I have settled into is:

• C-x p v – project-vc-dir, show me everything in the project
• C-x v D from dired – my/vc-dir-here, show me just this subdirectory

And that is really the whole post, nothing clever, no new package, just a three-line wrapper and one keybinding, but it has genuinely taken a surprising amount of friction out of navigating VC state in large repos where I know perfectly well the only thing I have touched is under src/foo/, and I do not particularly want to be reminded of every other outstanding change elsewhere in the tree.

And yes, magit can do this with some narrowing, but actually, I like vc-mode!