RE: Dired like functionality on a custom text file

[Drew Adams]

> > I have a situation where I have a lot of common files i need to edit
> > but they are all in various directories spread across my hard drive.
> > I was trying to come up with a way where I could make a 
> > text file that has all the paths to the files I commonly need and
> > somehow open that file into a dired like mode.  Is there anyway I
> > can do this, or even alternatively possibly easily pass the current
> > line my cursor is on in that file to the mini buffer when I put in
> > the visit command?
> 
> M-x find-name-dired prompts for the name of a directory
> and a filename wildcard, and fetch in a Dired buffer all
> files in the subdirectories matching the wildcard.
> 
> M-x find-grep-dired fetches files which contain strings matching a
> regular expression, recursively starting from a given directory.
> 
> Finally, dired-x is an extension to dired which provides a feature
> called "Virtual Dired". This feature puts a buffer with Dired-like
> contents in Dired mode. Have a look at the dired-x manual (C-h i m
> dired-x), which comes with a basic emacs install. You need first to
> enable dired-x with something like
>  (add-hook 'dired-load-hook  (lambda ()
>                  (load "dired-x")))

Here's another approach you might want to consider: 

1. Choose the files and subdirectories you want to access together. This is a
one-time operation, but you can modify the list later if you want.

2. Use that set of files and directories as completion candidates for file
operations.

You can do this with Icicles. See, for instance:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles_-_Support_for_Projects

There are links on that page for how to use such a defined set of files to do
various things, such as find and replace.