Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 420 posts

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#211

Post by kbenson »

renox wrote: post #186

I find quite funny that the author is so convinced that the use of colors is the "right default". 1) I'm colorblind so my view of colors is different from yours. 2) I find that any tool which use many colors suck: there will be a color combination which will be hard to read (for example git log: the sha1 keys are dark red on black, unreadable) but using just a few color is very nice (git diff: 3 colors, one for +, on…

> So colors by default? Thanks but no thanks.

Is the problem really that there are colors, or that the colors used don't work well for colorblindness? Do you find coloring that doesn't go afoul of your particular type of colorblindness still less useful than no coloring, or is it just that so often little attention is paid and an assumption is made that it's no worse than monochrome when in actuality it sometimes is?

I guess my real question boils down to if whether the author tried to make the default color profile at least not horrible in some respects for most colorblind users, would you still think defaulting to color is the wrong default?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#212

Post by kabdib »

Color is one of the first things I turn off. So many tools color files in ways that are very difficult to read (dark blue against a black background, really?)

I'm colorblind, too, so your red/orange/green distinctions are utterly wasted on me. Raw color is a very flaky and low fidelity way to communicate to a user.

Animation, on the other hand: Give that super important file that's somehow busted or very active some kind of blink or a meaningful animation and you'll have my attention. I may hate the tool for it, but you'll have my attention...

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#213

Post by cytzol »

renox wrote: post #186

I find quite funny that the author is so convinced that the use of colors is the "right default". 1) I'm colorblind so my view of colors is different from yours. 2) I find that any tool which use many colors suck: there will be a color combination which will be hard to read (for example git log: the sha1 keys are dark red on black, unreadable) but using just a few color is very nice (git diff: 3 colors, one for +, on…

Sorry the colours aren't working out. One of the feature requests in exa's pipeline is the ability to customise the colours, so you could make everything use bold colours if it's too dark, or make more things the same colour if it's too garish. Would something like this make it usable?

Speaking about the point in general, though, I think that terminal programs have been in a chicken-and-egg situation for the last decade or so with ANSI colours. Because colours only get used sparingly, not all terminals have good-looking colour schemes by default, which means they often look ugly, which means they only get used sparingly. There shouldn't be any reason why a terminal program should ship with unreadable colours by default (I have been killed in NetHack before because the default 'blue' colour in PuTTY was so dark, I could barely see it), and terminal programs that output colour should be smart about it (disable colours by default when not to a terminal, to avoid problems with grep like the one you cite).

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#214

Post by vacri »

PaulHoule wrote: post #190
renox wrote: post #186

I find quite funny that the author is so convinced that the use of colors is the "right default". 1) I'm colorblind so my view of colors is different from yours. 2) I find that any tool which use many colors suck: there will be a color combination which will be hard to read (for example git log: the sha1 keys are dark red on black, unreadable) but using just a few color is very nice (git diff: 3 colors, one for +, on…

My trouble is that most terminals have color settings such that colored text is not very visible. I really wish I could have a large number of different-colored terminals for different tasks, and that is easy if I turn off color, as designing a whole color set that always works is a bigger job. What's funny is that colored interfaces worked just fine on IBM 3270 terminals in the 1980s, as they did on PCs. I can't und…

Another tricky thing is finding a colour set that works against various backgrounds. A ton of people use either black or white backgrounds. Occasionally you come across a different colour (eg: some people use red backgrounds for 'root' or 'production'), but even if you exclude these folks, getting something that works with both black and white backgrounds is a minimum requirement.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#215

Post by dfc »

kbenson wrote: post #162
cytzol wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) You know what's funny? Every time I have to use ls, I'm so used to seeing the colours that I have so much trouble finding anything. Which column in the permissions is group-read? I can just scan for the green one. Which file in the listing am I supposed to be looking at? I just look for the one with the yellow underline. Colours have familiarity to me in a way that letters and words do not -- if I expec…

> Colours have familiarity to me in a way that letters and words do not -- if I expect to see green and instead see grey, I'll notice it faster than if I expected to see "r" and instead see "-". I think the coloration is good, but I would have defaulted a bit differently in the permissions. I would have made all user bits green, all group bits orange, and all other bits red. Not only does this denote the possible sec…

I really like a lot of the extra colors but I was also overwhelmed by the rainbow permissions. User, group, world are the organizing principle for me. World writeable is something I never want to have in my mind as similar to user writeable.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#216

Post by vacri »

cytzol wrote: post #155
_jal wrote: post #125

It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos. That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of 'grid' display entirely - reading across just doesn't work for me. Etc. More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I…

Thanks for the kudos! It's absolutely mindboggling how many times I've decided to deviate from one of ls's default settings -- certain that the old way was inferior and outdated, and that the new way will be obvious and immensely popular -- only to find people have no idea why I'm doing things this way! I need the colours to help me scan the output; if I don't see human-readable units, I curse myself for forgetting t…

Maybe make colourisation optional on either flag or as an env var. Then when you log in to a terminal and your profile loads, colourisation 'just works'.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#217

Post by vacri »

moxious wrote: post #151
_jal wrote: post #125

It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos. That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of 'grid' display entirely - reading across just doesn't work for me. Etc. More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I…

That muscle memory must have taken quite some time to develop. Here's to a future where the legions of programmers coming down the pike don't have to spend that investment to get the same or better result.

What's your proposed method for getting tailored, filtered output to your transient requirements, without expending so much effort as two keypresses?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#219

Post by dfc »

cytzol wrote: post #202
yegle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing `ls` is the first thing I do when learning a new language.

Thanks for the kind words, everybody. exa was my first Rust project and it just grew and grew.

It looks neat. You should include a link to the documentation on the homepage. After I saw the screenshot I went looking to see how easy it would be to change some of the colors before I installed it. I read down below that the colors are baked in:(

It would also be nice to see files owned by different users and some of the git functionality.

Post reply on HN