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Exa Is Deprecated

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Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#11

Post by boxed »

goku12 wrote: post #2

I hope that the author Benjamin Sago is alright. It's always concerning when FOSS developers disappear for a while - even though it isn't uncommon.

I wish there was a better way for the community to handle this situation without the original author doing what we see here. Sometimes the original author dies unexpectedly for example and it's very hard to salvage the work into a maintained fork.

I wrote about this in 2018: https://kodare.net/2018/06/25/salvaging-abandoned-projects.h...

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#12

Post by perihelions »

broodbucket wrote: post #9
perihelions wrote: post #8

This might affect me and other Debian stable users in the year 2025. The conservative side of the FOSS world rocks . exa's great; it's a polished, feature-rich ls(1) that broadly improves on GNU ls. The --tree view is awesome; I wish more tools used that UX pattern. The only other one I can immediately remember is pstree.

I have the opposite feeling about package lethargy, I don't want to remember that exa is now eza at the time that my distro finally gets around to packaging eza, I want to do it now when it's right in front of me. I'll go try lsd instead (and then I'll try the other ls rewrite, har har)

Ehh, I guess I'm your opposite. I want to be insulated from exciting upstream developments, especially for stable, boring stuff like coreutils. I want those to be boring. I don't want "exa is now eza" or whatever push-notified to my command line on a random Tuesday.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#13

Post by kbd »

I never used exa as a general `ls` replacement, but I did use it as a `tree` replacement. Its tree view that gives you file stats from ls alongside a `tree`-like view I haven't found replicated in any other tool.

Here are the aliases I use:

    et() { exa -alT --git -I'.git|node_modules|.mypy_cache|.pytest_cache|.venv' --color=always "$@" | less -R; }
    alias et1='et -L1'
    alias et2='et -L2'
    alias et3='et -L3'
exa never handled git ignores correctly so I had to manually provide common ignores with -I. But the above alias provides a scrollable tree view, with files colorized according to LS_COLORS, with file stats like `ls -l`, that I haven't found provided by any other tool. Suggestions for replacements welcome.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#14

Post by cb321 »

https://github.com/c-blake/lc in Nim might interest someone interested in a latterday 'ls'.

The screenshots should probably show underlined hard-links or italicized symlinks or other examples of "multi-file-attribute" -to- "multi-text-attribute" mapping. That kind of multi-ness seems generally neglected in this report generation space.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#16

Post by torstenvl »

blueflow wrote: post #10

exa: 8 years, dead ls: 38 years and counting. Long live ls.

I like vanilla `ls` but I do miss some display options from GNU ls when I'm on Mac, e.g., grouping directories first.

Luckily, of course, it's open source, so I just added the options I needed.

https://github.com/torstenvl/betterls if anyone is interested

exa seemed like overkill for my needs, and it was easier to add a couple lines of code than to learn a whole new tool.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#19

Post by dale_glass »

boxed wrote: post #11
goku12 wrote: post #2

I hope that the author Benjamin Sago is alright. It's always concerning when FOSS developers disappear for a while - even though it isn't uncommon.

I wish there was a better way for the community to handle this situation without the original author doing what we see here. Sometimes the original author dies unexpectedly for example and it's very hard to salvage the work into a maintained fork. I wrote about this in 2018: https://kodare.net/2018/06/25/salvaging-abandoned-projects.h...

We've started a non-profit to deal with such issues. It's a lot of work, but well worthwhile in the long term because part of the process is clarifying such issues, and the organization keeps on existing regardless of any individual member.

Still, even this situation is much better than what we had before. It's on github and so the project doesn't randomly vanish from existence when the owner isn't there to maintain the machine in their closet anymore. Contributors see each other and can realize "Hey, maintainer isn't active anymore but there's still interest in the project, maybe we should do something about this".

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#20

Post by gray_-_wolf »

torstenvl wrote: post #16
blueflow wrote: post #10

exa: 8 years, dead ls: 38 years and counting. Long live ls.

I like vanilla `ls` but I do miss some display options from GNU ls when I'm on Mac, e.g., grouping directories first. Luckily, of course, it's open source, so I just added the options I needed. https://github.com/torstenvl/betterls if anyone is interested exa seemed like overkill for my needs, and it was easier to add a couple lines of code than to learn a whole new tool.

You could also just install coreutils via brew...
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