7.9 How do I make dired use my ls program?

Dired uses an internal lisp implementation of ls by default on Windows. For consistent display of symbolic links and other information with other programs (eg Cygwin) and performance reasons, you may want to use a Windows port of ls instead.

(setq ls-lisp-use-insert-directory-program t)      ;; use external ls
(setq insert-directory-program "c:/cygwin/bin/ls") ;; ls program name