It typically runs inside the Emacs text editor as a specialized mode, though standalone versions have been written.

[1][2][failed verification] The first version of Dired was written as a stand-alone program independently in 1972 by Dave Lebling[3] at Project MAC, and circa 1974 by Stan Kugell at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

[1] It was incorporated into GNU Emacs from the earliest versions,[4] and re-implemented in C and C++ on other operating systems.

[9] Once marked, files can be operated on in various ways from deleting, to renaming, to executing an external shell command or elisp function on them.

By means of the Lisp package dired-x[10] it is also possible to handle existing ls-like directory listings in a virtual Dired mode.