> exa is written in Rust, so it’s small I suspected this would be total bullshit, and it is. Its small binary is a mere 3.4 megabytes. I wonder if I misinterpreted the "small" part.
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Exa, a modern replacement for ls
131–140 of 420 posts
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#132If you're interested in learning Rust by watching someone work, the author did several long screencasts of himself working on exa: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoBjY7TeCXzOULdiE40Ig1w
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#133> 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.
a thousands separator is a good middle ground
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#134> 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.
To be fair, you're ignoring the "by default" part. Yes, when you want to see uniform units, you can add a command line argument.
HN is so predictable that I knew someone would complain about this the second I read it, including ignoring the "by default" part so that they can by contrary.
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a lot bigger than conventional ls, but compared to a node.js implementation or Java program the description "small, fast" seems justified.
Why would I want to compare apples to oranges? Though admittedly in this crazy day and age someone has probably already reimplemented coreutils in node.js just because.
I have seen my fair share of javascript-based console applications. My guess is that the author tries to assure us that exa is no such thing but behaves reasonably for a console application (not gigantic, not incredibly slow) and makes his statements in that light.
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#136exa is hard to type, bad choice of name for something I'd be typing many times a day
+1. ls (or ll) is a more tangible name. a frequently used command is best to reside on the middle row of the keyboard. Also I've noticed terminal emulators (like terminator) recognize output and sprinkle in formatting on the display.
>terminal emulators (like terminator) recognize output
iirc, if your terminal emulator is doing something funny with the output of `ls` it's because they've re-implemented it as a function and are intercepting the call to ls and running their function instead, not because they're recognizing the output.
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#137I set up $LS_COLORS like 15 years sgo in my .zshrc… and haven't had to touch it since. Doesn't seem like a huge deal worth replacing it over.
Seems like it comes on by default in Ubuntu/Debian based systems for bash. Also, if you want to see the file sizes in MB, KB etc. then use 'ls -lh' command.
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#138> exa is written in Rust, so it’s small I suspected this would be total bullshit, and it is. Its small binary is a mere 3.4 megabytes. I wonder if I misinterpreted the "small" part.
I wouldn't say it's bullshit, just a difference of opinion.
38 kilobytes of executable isn't small, it's tiny; there's no way exa could get to that level without compromising its featureset or development, and even if you did, you'd just have another ls, and we already have ls.
If it's not small, what would you call it? Medium-sized? Something of that size means "download tens of megabytes of runtime and scatter files all over your computer" to me, and exa's smaller than that.
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#139The feature I'd be most interested in here is the integration with git, but I don't see an example on the site that demonstrates that. If the author is reading this, could you please add one? (Or maybe point it out, if I'm just missing it?)
Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I almost never use the human-readable file sizes. For this to get any traction it is going to need to accept every argument ls does and play nicely. Most people who work with nix systems work on many systems and some of them don't control the software loaded on them. If I have to remember that on this* system I have to use these arguments because I have exa, vs this system I have normal ls that is going to be a deal…
> I almost never use the human-readable file sizes. Same here. I love the idea, and i keep trying to use human-readable sizes in every command which supports them. But it turns out they're much less scannable than numbers in a common unit. How long does it take you to see which of these files is biggest: 13k potatoes.txt 7M tomatoes.txt 128 recipe_ideas.txt 1G hot_sauce_formula.txt How about now: 13093 potatoes.txt 7…
I really want to know what the deal with hot_sauce_formula being 1G is. That must be one hell of a hot sauce.