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Exa Is Deprecated

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Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#171
post #52

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.

This seems to heavily exaggerate the problem IMHO. Most sane people don't replace any of the basic tools like exa on critical infra that is expected to be low maintenance. Exa is a tool you install in terminals you personally use, purely for your personal comfort. And due to this situation it needs to be manually updated to a new name/new source, it's a one time operation. Surely not ideal, but hardly an unsurmountable obstacle. People using tools like this aren't exactly the sort of audience that is unfamiliar with having to install/uninstall a package.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#172
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worth noting that the Unix shell itself is not a "built-in". The kernel is agnostic about the user interface, which is left entirely to userspace programs to implement. (That was one of Unix's major innovations.)

built in to the shell, not the kernel lol

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#174
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…

I haven't heard about LSD before and was just about to give it a try on WSL2. Thank you for saving me a headache and some time.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#175
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…

> command prompt

You could use Windows Terminal instead? Or does it have the same issue?

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#176
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…

And I could immediately see issues with its design, from cross-platform support to ease of configuration.

It's not wise to accept broken tools just because they persist, that's just mindless conservatism

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#177
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Just looking at the site. Under "adopted projects" you list Light Table. But the link just goes to the old, unmaintained repo. It would be great if you could also link to the maintained versions of repos.

The list has repos that Code Shelter has access to (ie ones that you can request to join). We don't have access to the new Light Table repo, so it wouldn't be apt to add there.

Apologies if I'm being dumb, but I'm confused. I assumed "adopted" implied that Code Shelter has some alternative repo that it (Code Shelter's community) is maintaining. Is that not the case? If not, then why list it at all?

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> command prompt You could use Windows Terminal instead? Or does it have the same issue?

As far as I know, Command Prompt, Powershell, WSL, etc all use the same underlying font system, TTF. And not many fonts have a TTF version. If you try using an OTF it won't be detected.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#179
post #169
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--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.

-R does work on macOS. It's part of POSIX and macOS is actually certified Unix.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#180
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ls (specifically the version used on just about every linux distro) had a huge breaking change in 2016, so this is objectively false.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html

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