The only ls replacement I have installed is sl. And that's really just a typing aid.
Exa Is Deprecated
121–130 of 244 posts
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
YMMV, but many of us find it easier to maintain rust + cargo than the old C + autotools mess.
FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even develope…
> I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.
Which ones gave you trouble?
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#123Yet another example of why I don't trust any software that markets itself as "modern". In another 20 years, ls will still work perfectly fine.
And so will exa, probably. And if it won't, it will be forked. Which is exactly the reason "ls" is working perfectly fine for you today. The original AT&T UNIX "ls" has been forked over and over again and rewritten from scratch several times. You're using an evolved fork of this "ls" if you're using macOS or BSD, but if you're on Linux you're using a rewrite (GNU coreutils ls), and if you're running BusyBox you're us…
That's mostly rubbish though.
The reason ls works perfectly fine today is no one dares fuck with the interface in case they break everything that depends on 30 years of assumptions even if they do suck a little bit. That includes all the forks and rewrites.
This is almost entirely missing in "modern" software development. And I don't think any of us have time or energy really to track down varying different forks of something which needs to work like it did in 1990 when you run that shell script you wrote 15 years ago.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#124A nice metaphor when the "modern replacement" for something as basic as a directory listing is deprecated while the original means (the built-in ls) still works fine and isnt. EDIT: ls on linux is apparently an executable part of GNU and not a built-in
Except it doesn't work fine, its poor design is one of the reasons for the modern replacements
I've never had a problem with ls. What about it doesn't "work fine?"
I could imagine another utility having a different feature set that people find useful, but in my experience gnu ls always does what it claims to do, and is so foundational that it's a de facto standard when working with Linux.
The desire to "replace" such well established utilities seems misguided to me - by all means add on additional utilities that help you out, but I think it would be wise accept the fact that due to its long history "ls" and similar tools are not going to be replaced any time soon.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#125Yet another example of why I don't trust any software that markets itself as "modern". In another 20 years, ls will still work perfectly fine.
I use `exa` (and now `eza`) because it provides a better experience than GNU `ls`, IMHO. Sure, I don't _need_ it, but it's nice. I don't see any downside, especially since I've aliased it to `ls` since time immemorial and thus I only need to re-alias eza to ls again.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#126Just another alias ... # WAS alias ls='exa ...' # IS alias exa='eza ...' alias ls='exa ...'
Just another "command not found" on that remote machine you forgot you were on.
This is the problem with all tools outside the most basic and you have to keep muscle memory for grep and ls to deal with it. Thus the fancy replacement tools have a cost.
I can bear to pay that cost for "fd" (fdfind) and ripgrep but exa didn't really offer me enough.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the owner is outright missing, to the point where the newer fork owners can't even get the repo archived, one would reasonably assume that they'd need to rename/rebrand the tool in order to publish it elsewhere. It frankly doesn't seem like a deprecation in the traditional sense.
Either way, it still speaks to the maintainability of these modern replacements, many of which are personal projects. tools like ls or grep are certainly showing their age, but that has also been their strength. The POSIX ecosystem comes in many flavors but I can always depend on it. It’s not like I can ever expect to shell into any arbitrary system or container and expect to have exa/lsd/rg or any of these nice repl…
> My tooling needs to be somewhat more portable.
Ah yes, because it's 100% impossible to learn new tools and fall back to the core ones when you need to. ;P
I've been doing this for decades now, it's just not that big of a deal.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#128A nice metaphor when the "modern replacement" for something as basic as a directory listing is deprecated while the original means (the built-in ls) still works fine and isnt. EDIT: ls on linux is apparently an executable part of GNU and not a built-in
That isn't a metaphor; maybe you mean irony.
Lindy effect. ls is likely to be around 40 years from now since its already been around 40 years (I am assuming it's been around since 80s correct me if I am wrong).
The practices of project sustenance are already baked in, where as new projects like exa/eza have to figure out and put these practices in place to be around for that long.
We have a phrase "test of time" for a good reason.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#129There's a hint of a belief in this thread - common also in threads about alternative shells and Vim setups - that someone who uses a tool like this will irrevocably lose the knowledge of how to use ls. Am I perhaps a genius or is it just not that difficult to know two tools?
Flipping tools has a cost because we have to think more about it. I don't know if you've tried flipping between the windows commandline and bash several times a day but it can be quite annoying just with things like "\" compared to "/" where the automatic part of your brain cannot take over for you and you have to do everything consciously.
Re: Exa Is Deprecated
#130A nice metaphor when the "modern replacement" for something as basic as a directory listing is deprecated while the original means (the built-in ls) still works fine and isnt. EDIT: ls on linux is apparently an executable part of GNU and not a built-in
`ls` doesn't have a 'parent' in the hierarchy. `exa` does, it's `ls` itself, so there's a fallback. When there's no fallback, it cannot be deprecated; there's nothing to use otherwise. So it's either kept alive or forked indefinitely.