looking for a more emacs-like dired mode

Hi,

I've looked around but haven't found a more emacs-like dired mode. 

The important things I'd like are: the ability to have multiple
buffers in dired mode; the ability to set my own switches for "ls"
and switch between sorting alphabetically and by modification date;
and more ways to use flagged files other than renaming and deleting,
such as copying and running shell commands.

It's important to me to have the same display format as dired mode;
I especially don't want to lose a line of the display with an
in-buffer mode line.

Please let me know if I'm overlooking something so that I won't
reinvent the wheel.

Thanks,
Ron

P.S. I'm running version B0.99.17-111/Unix but am open to moving to
a development version if it will solve this problem.


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