[h-e-w] OS specific behavior with dired

[Tony Cappellini]

I'm relatively new to emacs, and wanted to start with my init.el empty,

so that I could modify it gradually and learn how the changes affect the behavior of emacs.

With that in mind, my init.el is still pretty lean and basic.

I also use the same init.el file between my Windows machines and my Macbook Pro.

I'm using Emacs 23.3 on both Windows & Mac

I have not modified the behavior of dired, but it behaves a little differently for each OS.

On the Mac, dired opens up two vertical windows, on Windows it opens up two horizontal windows.

While that isn't significantly different, It  makes me wonder what other gotchas are waiting to cause me problems

learning to use Emacs.

So- to start, I'd like to modify init.el so that dired opens vertical windows for both machines.

I already have code in my init.el to execute Windows specific and Mac specific changes (f needed)

1. How do I modify dired's behavior so that vertical windows are always opened?

2. How do I modify dired so that it doesn't keep switching from one window to the other when I click on a directory name? There's no reason why dired doesn't re-use the same window. With that in mind If I want to go back to the

previous selection, how would I do this?

Thanks