Live data from Hacker News

Exa: An alternative to Ls

the.exa.website

101–105 of 105 posts

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#101

These new tools are neat, but because ls, tree, git have most of these features it has been tough to talk myself into using exa. One minor thing that bugs me about ls however, is the date display. I'd like iso 8601 for old dates, with a human-readable date for recent changes. Currently I have this: -rw-rw-r-- 1 foo foo 37 2016-03-28 9:14 .Xmodmap -rw------- 1 foo foo 496k Wed Oct 27 14:27 .xsession-errors Via `ls --t…

You might have a quicker time if you build it locally with the cutoff configured in the code. Then you'd have the behavior you'd want while waiting for the devs to reply.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#102
post #85
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the programming languages analogy, can you elaborate? One way to interpret that is “s/program/function, class or module/g“, but that sounds strange to me.

That was indeed the thrust of the analogy. Basically, we try to design programming languages so that the interface is decoupled from the implementation. A function should have an intuitive, descriptive name that reflects what it achieves, free of such terrestrial concerns as who wrote it, and when, and whether a different person decided to fix a bunch of bugs in it. But commands in Unix exist in a single-layer, perma…

That is a good thing, which I wish more package systems used. In popular programming package managers that use “semver”, bumping a major version usually breaks all of the internet and then some more. If you don’t believe it, just search for a non-trivial gulp or webpack recipes and it will come. The fact that ls is always the same (except for bsd and few non-standard options) is very useful when you plan to run your system for years+. Personally I don’t want to learn ripgrep, grep and aliases I have in my .profile are fine by me, and there is no reason for me to spend time to replace them with shiny new.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#103
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> little bsd differences have been driving me nuts since I took a job that forced me into a MacBook, but these tools solve that issue and are easy to install with Homebrew. I'm in the same boat as you - I love the the rust-based CLI tools. I would also recommend installing the GNU coreutils via homebrew ( https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils ). This lets you run the GNU coreutils by prefixing them with a `g`, l…

Oh that's neat, thanks. Given you also use the rust tools, where do you find yourself reaching for the g* tools?

Mainly find and sed due to muscle memory, but I've been using fd and sd more and more lately.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#104
post #101

These new tools are neat, but because ls, tree, git have most of these features it has been tough to talk myself into using exa. One minor thing that bugs me about ls however, is the date display. I'd like iso 8601 for old dates, with a human-readable date for recent changes. Currently I have this: -rw-rw-r-- 1 foo foo 37 2016-03-28 9:14 .Xmodmap -rw------- 1 foo foo 496k Wed Oct 27 14:27 .xsession-errors Via `ls --t…

You might have a quicker time if you build it locally with the cutoff configured in the code. Then you'd have the behavior you'd want while waiting for the devs to reply.

Good idea, thanks.

Re: Exa: An alternative to Ls

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`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.

This is what I get running `exa -l --time-style=full-iso` on my ext4 system: `drwxr-xr-x - kosa 2021-09-02 12:20:39.114446860 -0400 Desktop` Unless it's different on xfs/ufs, this seems to be nanosecond resolution to me,

You may be right, because I have not tried exa, but this is what is written in the exa documentation:

  full-iso specifies the timestamp down to the millisecond,
  including its offset down to the minute, without using the
  locale or current year.
If this is information is obsolete, they should update their documentation, because wrong information like this discourages adoption.
Post reply on HN