I just came across this dired mode screen at Wikipedia. I am looking into those customizations.
Regarding colors, I guess just specifying the correct faces will do, but how do I get dired to show file sized in kbytes by default? And the available space in MBs (top line)?
To get the file sizes in kbytes, you can customize the variable dired-listing-switches to use the -k option:
(setq dired-listing-switches "-alk")
You have to do a little more work to get the total/available numbers in MB. This worked on my Linux system, but the available portion failed to work on my Windows box:
(setq directory-free-space-args "-Pm")
(defadvice insert-directory (after insert-directory-adjust-total-by-1024 activate)
"modify the total number by dividing it by 1024"
(save-excursion
(save-match-data
(goto-char (point-min))
(when (re-search-forward "^ *total used in directory \\([0-9]+\\) ")
(replace-match (number-to-string (/ (string-to-number (match-string 1)) 1024)) nil nil nil 1)))))