Exa: An alternative to Ls • Hacker News Board

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#11

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

Lately I have been creating "three sided cards" which usually have a photograph or art reproduction on the front, a back side with an explanation and qr code that point to a web site.

Each of these is a package of files in a directory.

In the last few days I've been developing "ls-like" functionality for these cards with the specific goal of listing cards that need maintenance. For instance I did a series of photographs where I printed the cards but didn't generate the web sites.

Architecturally it's interesting, particularly in that there is the selection logic, the way you display a card, and then the realization that you ought to be able to do something to a card other than display metadata for it but select the cards with the same facility you use to select them for "ls".

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#12

Post by qsi » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

Won't use it for the simple reason it's much harder to type (for me) than ls, and doesn't seem to offer anything I can't find in ls right now.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#13

Post by jakeva » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

qsi wrote: post #12

Won't use it for the simple reason it's much harder to type (for me) than ls, and doesn't seem to offer anything I can't find in ls right now.

I've got ls aliased to exa

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#14

Post by setpatchaddress » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #8

theamk wrote: post #3

I have nothing against exa, but the two examples in this post are are not correct for any sort of recent system. > Here’s an example. exa, by default, runs the stat system call on every file it encounters. So does "ls" ... for at least last 20 years. Just checked on random Ubuntu system I had -- executables and dirs are highlighted with different colors. > exa makes heavy use of colours, treating them as opt-out rath…

There's a features page on their website that shows some more tricks it can do, like smarter file type colouring, generating a tree view and showing the git status of files. I'm still not entirely convinced that it's a must-have, but it's more than just ls with fancy colours. Personally, I'd much rather have seen an output format like JSON as a feature instead, so you can do some easier scripting through exa and jq.…

Yes, they really need to call out what makes it different. The front page makes it sound mostly like an alias to ls with specific options + an additional call to `git status`.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#15

Post by chomp » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

I'm not gonna hate on this too much; side projects like this are fun and help the creator understand the filesystem-side of their operating system. The colors are pretty, there's some nifty features to better understand the file list you're staring at.

This won't ever replace `ls` because it's not POSIX compliant, but that's okay because I don't think it needs to be. I have run into cases where downstream packages have dependencies on non-POSIX commands which gets a little annoying, but you can always choose something else (or take it on yourself to re-implement their idea in a POSIX-compliant way), which is the whole point of open source software.

Let this creator have their fun!

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#16

Post by jordemort » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

open-paren wrote: post #9

I've been using lsd[0] as my ls replacement for a while. I like that it has a config file for defaults, so I don't have to change a bunch of aliases when setting up a new system. 0: https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

I'm also enjoying lsd, to the point where I've aliased ls to it. The file icons are fun.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#17

Post by linkdd » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

faho wrote: post #4

linkdd wrote: post #2

> The computer is no longer the bottleneck. High load average, full swap, memory leaks, those things still happen today. > exa, by default, runs the stat system call on every file it encounters. 99% of ls's use case are: show me the files in this folder. What happened to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and the UNIX philosophy (do only one thing, but do it well)? > 256-colour terminals are everywhere. Laughs with Window…

>Laughs with Windows Terminal The new windows terminal has truecolor.

And yet git bash still needs ansicon to have ANSI escape sequences handled correctly.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#18

Post by gkfasdfasdf » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

For me, the killer feature of exa is the git integration. Being able to do 'l' (aliased to 'exa --long --all --links --git') and seeing the git status (added, ignored, modified, etc) along with other file details is awesome.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#19

Post by yewenjie » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

Does anybody have experience with `lc`? The description is quite intriguing.

https://github.com/c-blake/lc

c-blake/lc: A post-modern, "multi-dimensional", configurable, abbreviating, extensible ls/file lister in Nim

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#20

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

linkdd wrote: post #2

> The computer is no longer the bottleneck. High load average, full swap, memory leaks, those things still happen today. > exa, by default, runs the stat system call on every file it encounters. 99% of ls's use case are: show me the files in this folder. What happened to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and the UNIX philosophy (do only one thing, but do it well)? > 256-colour terminals are everywhere. Laughs with Window…

It might not be KISS, but I think exa embodies the UNIX philosophy. It does one thing (show me the contents of a folder) and it does it well (arguably better than ls as long as the consumer is a human).

The UNIX philosophy isn't "only call one syscall", so getting more info on the files it's displaying is far game in my book.