I sensed I could improve how my directories appeared in dired, instead of just being bold-face. The question was, how to find which face to change to get the desired result? Digging through my customize-faces options was tedious and sometimes misses the tree for the forest unless you know which one you’re looking for. Locating the face at point Enter the beautiful self-documenting nature of Emacs. Put your cursor on the thing you want to change (remember, our whole philosophy emacs inherited from *Nix is that everything is text).