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Exa: An alternative to Ls

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Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#51

Post by adrian_b »

paxys wrote: post #33

Tree view looks like it could be useful. Every other feature is meh though.

Looking at the available options, I like that it can display the extended attributes of the files, because I use extended attributes for various purposes.

On the other hand, it could not replace ls for me, because exa does not have any equivalent of the ls option --full-time. All the possible exa options to display the time truncate the timestamps to various resolutions (much coarser than how the timestamps are stored in the file system).

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#53

Post by cyberge99 »

kelvie wrote: post #50
dopu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess. Nothing’s stopping you from remapping ‘ls’ to exa. That’s what I did.

I've been doing this -- it's annoying for things like "ls -rt" and other commands that you may or may not use often.

Yeah, I just use \ls -whatever for those.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#54

Post by kingaillas »

bikeshaving wrote: post #44

I wish the authors thought a little bit more about the actual physicality of typing out commands. `exa` on a QWERTY keyboard is typed on one hand, across three rows, and with the weakest fingers. I guess I could put this into muscle memory, but I expect an `ls` like command to be ergonomic to some degree and I see myself making a lot of typos.

You better not switch your keyboard layout to dvorak... 'ls' are both right pinky letters. ;)

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#55

Post by codezero »

Switching tools sure does highlight your own quirky usage of a tool. I installed exa and aliased it to ls, probably mistake number one.

I tend to look for things using reverse sorting a lot, and exa -ltra exa -lSr don't work out of the box (not sure why I thought it might, maybe because exa -la did) - And now I'm faced with reading a man page or documentation for some 15-20 seconds which I can't be bothered to do, despite that seeming so simple :)

I do think I'll try to give it a shot, it looks quite nice.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#56

Post by kosayoda »

adrian_b wrote: post #51
paxys wrote: post #33

Tree view looks like it could be useful. Every other feature is meh though.

Looking at the available options, I like that it can display the extended attributes of the files, because I use extended attributes for various purposes. On the other hand, it could not replace ls for me, because exa does not have any equivalent of the ls option --full-time . All the possible exa options to display the time truncate the timestamps to various resolutions (much coarser than how the timestamps are stor…

Is what you're looking for (re: --full-time) not `exa -l --time-style=full-iso`?

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#57

Post by dang »

exa previous threads:

I use `exa` instead of `ls` on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26559334 - March 2021 (51 comments)

Exa – A Modern Replacement for Ls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20564000 - July 2019 (6 comments)

Exa – A Modern Replacement for Ls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342031 - March 2019 (1 comment)

Exa – a modern replacement for ls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658211 - Dec 2018 (2 comments)

Exa, a modern replacement for ls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14923362 - Aug 2017 (403 comments)

Show HN: Exa, a replacement for ls written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087108 - Feb 2015 (87 comments)

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#58

Post by adrian_b »

kosayoda wrote: post #56
adrian_b wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the available options, I like that it can display the extended attributes of the files, because I use extended attributes for various purposes. On the other hand, it could not replace ls for me, because exa does not have any equivalent of the ls option --full-time . All the possible exa options to display the time truncate the timestamps to various resolutions (much coarser than how the timestamps are stor…

Is what you're looking for (re: --full-time) not `exa -l --time-style=full-iso`?

`exa -l --time-style=full-iso' truncates the timestamps to millisecond resolution.

`ls --full-time" gives the timestamps as they are stored by the file system, without alteration. For example the xfs timestamps and the FreeBSD ufs timestamps have nanosecond resolution.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#59

Post by deeblering4 »

> You list files hundreds of times a day. Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?

I don't spend any time squinting... And personally the bright colors shown in the example are harder on my eyes than the shades of gray I've selected in my terminal emulator.

I also work with a large number of systems, and prefer to work from muscle memory with the tooling that is installed by default 100% of the time.

Part of me wishes projects like this would just write patches for the thing they are trying to replace. There is no reason ls couldn't output emoji file types, just patch it in ls and make it a flag people can alias, like --color=auto.

To each their own I guess.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#60

Post by andreineculau »

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

Thanks! It's always nice to read HN threads and get "better" (subjective maybe) alternatives than the original post
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