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Exa Is Deprecated

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Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#161

Post by k_roy »

UkiahSmith wrote: post #73
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 much prefer lsd over exa, as lsd has better backwards compatibility with the flags. Specifically `-t` for sorting by time, exa has it specify the time field used.

This is exactly why I switched some months back to lsd after years of using exa.

The muscle memory of `ls -alt` and `ls -alrt` was too powerful for me to switch to `-snew`, even after literal years.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#162

Post by monsieurbanana »

JeremyNT wrote: post #124
eviks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm annoyed that ls is not the same depending on the OS

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#163

Post by monsieurbanana »

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

Then you will be unhappy to learn that exa itself isn't deprecated, only the original github is because the owner isn't reachable.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#164

Post by baz00 »

Macha wrote: post #158
baz00 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ls does not have a consistent interface beyond the basics. And honestly, for the "portable subset", you may not even realise that ls is aliased to exa or lsd or whatever. This is why on why of my systems I'm sitting at right now, (MacOS) ls --help reports "unrecognized option `--help`" and on the other (GNU) ls reports a list of options so long that the entire alphabet is accounted for in both lower and upper case.

--help doesn't do anything functional so that's not a good example.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#165

Post by pneumic »

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.

on mac I do this:

    alias ls='LC_COLLATE=C \ls -F'
doesn't sort dot directories before dot files, but it's good enough

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#166

Post by queuebert »

baz00 wrote: post #119
eviks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it doesn't work fine, its poor design is one of the reasons for the modern replacements

I can't say I've found anything particularly wrong with it in the last 40 years.

The only problem I ever have with 'ls' is accidentally listing very large directories, but that is almost always an OS and filesystem issue at the core.

If an ls replacement could somehow handle directories with >10^4 files faster, then I'd switch.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#167

Post by Night_Thastus »

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 want to like LSD. I really, really, REALLY do.

But holy hell is getting a working font a nightmare. I spent multiple days desperately trying to figure out font issues, because LSD refuses to list what fonts actually work for it.

And if you just use something from Nerd Fonts thinking it will work (which is what LSD recommends, btw), you'll find that 3/4 or more are missing some stupid symbol or another that LSD uses.

And then you find out that getting it working on other systems is awful. WSL which uses the Windows command prompt under the hood needs a TTF version instead of OTF, which many Nerd Fonts don't bother to make. On MSYS2 it just indefinitely hangs. It's a nightmare.

I have gotten LSD to work once in all my trying on one system.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#168

Post by dmix »

Macha wrote: post #160
blumomo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Singular they is not a thing that was made up by trans people, but has been annoying pedants for centuries.

Yeah occasionally mixing a singular "they" that way is very common in english in certain contexts. Particularly when its short clear paragraphs talking about a single person. But that's still a distinction from being used as a pronoun everywhere, which can definitely get confusing quickly, even for non-ESL readers... which is all that really matters in writing/communication.

I'm seeing it more often in journalism now where multiple people or organizations are referred to through out an article and then "they" gets thrown in liberally for social etiquette. It takes serious mental effort to keep track of who they are referring to. Might as well just always use their name at that point to avoid both conflict and confusion shrug.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#169

Post by Macha »

baz00 wrote: post #164
Macha wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ls does not have a consistent interface beyond the basics. And honestly, for the "portable subset", you may not even realise that ls is aliased to exa or lsd or whatever. This is why on why of my systems I'm sitting at right now, (MacOS) ls --help reports "unrecognized option `--help`" and on the other (GNU) ls reports a list of options so long that the entire alphabet is accounted for in both lower and upper case.

--help doesn't do anything functional so that's not a good example.

-R, --group-directories first are some notable, frequent options I use on GNU ls that are missing from MacOS ls. Along with every "long" option, which I like to prefer in scripts to make them more self documenting.

exa actually does support both, so in a way it's more compatible with my usage of (GNU) ls than (MacOS) ls is.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#170

Post by justin_oaks »

dorfsmay wrote: post #56
bachmeier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not even ripgrep?

I usually don't reach for new command line tools, but ripgrep is one where I feel stupid for not using it sooner.

Even VS Code uses it for its search beneath the hood.

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