Exa Is Deprecated

Post by Sparkle-san » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #52

minorannoyance2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a bit unfair to call it dead, exa's maintainer is unreachable, but the whole thing lives on as eza and is very much alive. That's a bit like saying that any company/product that changes it's name is dead at that point.

Everyone who has exa installed and setup aliases now has to uninstall, install a new tool, and edit their workflows. exa is dead. People can move to yet another ls replacement, but they can't stay on exa.

Post by michaelmior » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #77

michaelmior wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it will still lack many of the features that exa has. Although it's no longer maintained, I suspect it will also continue to work for a long time. There's also a fork that is still maintained. Personally, I tend to avoid using replacements for POSIX tools in any shell scripts where possible for this reason. But in terms of what I use day-to-day in interactive sessions, I'll take whatever improvements modern tools…

a.k.a. tradeoffs. You can have more features for less stability, so you need to decide what you care more about in a given context.

Post by sundarurfriend » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #37

arjvik wrote: post #4

I've been using LSD instead of Exa, so I'm lightly relieved that I don't have to change over. Both projects are amazing little utilities that when combined with a well-customized shell, really make using the terminal a joy. I absolutely love the trend of rewriting classic Unix utilities in rust, because the new tools often have (small or large) usability and quality of life improvements that altogether make the termi…

> I absolutely love the trend of rewriting classic Unix utilities I avoid them unless I'm capable of maintaining them myself. My primary reason for using classic Unix utilities is trusting that they'll still work in a few years. The initial stages of a rewrite can be a lot of fun, but I want to use it long after the excitement has worn off.

Post by cb321 » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

unscaled wrote: post #95

noobermin wrote: post #88

A 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

On most Unix flavors it is not built-in. The only shell I know that has "ls" built-in is BusyBox. And besides, I said in other places: "ls" has been "deprecated by its maintainer" more times than exa, it's just that somebody has always forked it. GNU "ls" (the one in Linux) is a complete rewrite of the original shell, and it is annoyingly incompatible with the macOS fork of BSD ls.

Post by tlamponi » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

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)