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Exa, a modern replacement for ls

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Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#121

Post by Recursing »

lsiebert wrote: post #74
khedoros1 wrote: post #62

> For example, exa prints human-readable file sizes by default (when would you not want that?) When I've got two similar but non-identical files, and I think that the difference between their sizes might be important. That's a silly nitpick, though. It's not like I lose ls by installing exa. Plus, it's a nice excuse to see if I can get cargo working around the corporate firewall.

I'd also consider things like piping to awk or finding the largest files in a set of directories. Human readable sorting is much more complex.

Isn't there `sort -h`?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#122

Post by ShabbosGoy »

general_pizza wrote: post #17

This is heavily influenced by personal taste, but I don't understand the value of having so many elements of the output colorized. File type seems a useful case, everything else in the output of `exa -l` just looks distracting to me. Just my 2 cents.

I also don't like colorized output - for instance, what if you want to pipe stdout of a process to Slack? You will get bash control characters.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#124

Post by wildmusings »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #122
general_pizza wrote: post #17

This is heavily influenced by personal taste, but I don't understand the value of having so many elements of the output colorized. File type seems a useful case, everything else in the output of `exa -l` just looks distracting to me. Just my 2 cents.

I also don't like colorized output - for instance, what if you want to pipe stdout of a process to Slack? You will get bash control characters.

I don't know if exa does this, but most command line tools disable colorized output automatically if they determine that stdout is not an interactive terminal.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#125

Post by _jal »

It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos.

That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of 'grid' display entirely - reading across just doesn't work for me. Etc.

More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I do it so much during the average day that I don't even think about it. Can't say I immediately know every one of the switches, but probably 10 or so variants I use daily are pure muscle memory, and less frequently used things (extended attributes, symlink-deref options, etc.) I can remember without the man page.

So in that sense, `ls` is well into the same category as vi for me - I'm so accustomed to whatever warts there may be that switching would be much more painful than any efficiency gain.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#126

Post by theBaba »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #122
general_pizza wrote: post #17

This is heavily influenced by personal taste, but I don't understand the value of having so many elements of the output colorized. File type seems a useful case, everything else in the output of `exa -l` just looks distracting to me. Just my 2 cents.

I also don't like colorized output - for instance, what if you want to pipe stdout of a process to Slack? You will get bash control characters.

It does the sane thing when it detects the output is being pipped and doesn't output the color controls.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#127

Post by 19guid »

jachee wrote: post #113
ktRolster wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it turns out you like it, you can use it as a direct replacement for ls by using alias: alias ls=exa If you put that in your bash profile, it will be permanent (until you remove it from your bash profile, of course).

And if you want actual ls, you can just: command ls

Or even:

  \ls

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#128

Post by eridius »

kowdermeister wrote: post #30
mavhc wrote: post #19

exa is hard to type, bad choice of name for something I'd be typing many times a day

I thought the same at first. ls is good mnemonic for list, but what exa stands for and why three letters? "gf" for example would be better. neighbor characters on the keyboard, could stand for get files.

"exa" probably stands for "examine", though I don't know for sure.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#129

Post by pmontra »

khedoros1 wrote: post #62

> For example, exa prints human-readable file sizes by default (when would you not want that?) When I've got two similar but non-identical files, and I think that the difference between their sizes might be important. That's a silly nitpick, though. It's not like I lose ls by installing exa. Plus, it's a nice excuse to see if I can get cargo working around the corporate firewall.

I came here to make exactly this comment but you read the post much sooner than me.

At least I learned that ls had a -h option. I don't know why I should use it on files but I routinely do df -h to check the size of file systems. That's a place where it is useful.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#130

Post by [deleted] »

erichurkman wrote: post #38
assafmo wrote: post #22

The main problem I can think of is that I'm so used to type cd and then ls... But OTOH it's as simple to fix as alias ls=exa EDIT: "exa prints human-readable file sizes by default (when would you not want that?)" I actually use bytes a lot for certain progress calculations. Also I get an error "exa: error while loading shared libraries: libhttp_parser.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"…

Why does a directory lister need an HTTP parser?

[deleted]
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