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Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

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Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#231

Post by samstave »

cytzol wrote: post #199
hosh wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use colorized ls by default and get a bit peeved by how I have to jump through hoops to get that on OSX by default. If it works out. i'll probably alias "ls" to "exa" in the future. That said, the binary isn't self-contained (I know, I know) so I was in the middle of compiling it from source before being pulled away for work. Looking forward to trying it.

> That said, the binary isn't self-contained (I know, I know) It wouldn't be right if something didn't go badly wrong at the worst possible moment!

exa: error while loading shared libraries: libhttp_parser.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#232

Post by deathanatos »

cytzol wrote: post #165
dozzie wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! Where are my colours in `foo | less -SR' on the terminal ? It's not " the sane thing" to differentiate output on STDOUT's attributes. grep doesn't have the --colour option ternary for nothing.

grep does have `--color=auto`, though, which checks whether you're printing to a terminal or not. exa's opinion is this: users shouldn't be expected to know that adding colour to ANSI terminal output adds more bytes to the stream. If you run `foo`, see that it outputs a line, then run `foo | grep line`, you'd expect to see that line without having to stop and think about what representation the colours had. Yeah, it'…

> it's annoying that less is one of the few programs that doesn't alter its input and would be a perfect use case for reading in ANSI codes.

I'm not certain if it's exactly what you're getting at, but less can be instructed to parse ANSI color sequences, and output them, with the -R flag. (If you forget to put -R on the command line, or some utility automatically starts less for you, you can also type "-R" while in less to trigger that behavior.) That said, less has to be fed the sequences, and most programs will not output color sequences when piped to less, as they detect that the output isn't a TTY (this is normally the right thing to do, it just kinda sucks in less's case) so you might need to, e.g., that_prog --color=always | less.

> There's just no way for exa to know that it's being piped into less while keeping the above rule true too.

Yeah, this is the real problem. I kind of wish there was some sort of content negotiation between piped utilities, s.t. less could inform the upstream utility of "hey! I speak ANSI color codes!".

What follows is definitely well into the "WTF too clever" column and I do not recommend it, but, this is HN: I presume you could riff through /proc trying to find the other end of the pipe that you're writing to (I think /proc on Linux has that) and then, if the executable's name is "less", well, you see where I'm going…

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#233

Post by untog »

This is cool, but it doesn't solve (in fact, exacerbates) my usual complaint with `ls` - I don't know what the arguments are. The example on the site is:

    exa -bghHliS
Argh! I want to be able to say `ls --size` to get the file sizes. I don't want to remember a million arguments.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#234

Post by meric »

sizeofchar wrote: post #228
mavhc wrote: post #19

exa is hard to type, bad choice of name for something I'd be typing many times a day

The author could change the name to pls (pretty ls). Still easy, confortable and differentiates it from ls, while maintaining proximity.

    export pls=exa

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#235

Post by SwellJoe »

I just noticed the tests and the incredible lengths the author went to in order to effectively test exa. It's really impressive. GNU coreutils ls has a pretty good test suite, too ( http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/tests/ls ), but this goes well above and beyond the call for something so new.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#236

Post by tomc1985 »

cytzol wrote: post #213
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 dec…

re: PuTTY, it seems so odd that its default blue continues to be the shade it is to this day. It is a nearly unreadable default.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#237

Post by jolmg »

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…

Every new terminal I open uses a random background color. All colored text is always readable.

What I did was make sure the background colors were always dark, and set the first 16 terminal colors to be light. I randomized the background color by specifing it to the terminal via a command line option as the output of this 10-line script[1] that takes an HSV Value as an argument and returns an RGB with randomized Hue.

It's nice for terminals to be differently colored when you have many of them open. It helps one to realize when you've switched to the right one.

[1] https://github.com/jolmg/randcolor

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#238

Post by git-pull »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #83
git-pull wrote: post #79

While it's not the intention to replace the binary itself, I'm just not a fan of the idea of substituting system built-ins in everyday behavior. Stuff like cd, ls, etc. I like to keep it to the basics. Even just with PATHs or aliases, or a new binary entirely. And I'm a person who is no stranger to dot-configs. I've never taken it as far as Z(1), https://github.com/rupa/z . A system builtin is stuff you'd see stowed…

It's not overriding anything, so you're ranting against a faulty premise. The command is called "exa", not "ls", and it isn't even a drop-in replacement -- it doesn't have the same flags. You can't alias "ls" to it.

I don't see it that way.

The focus over the qualifier of whether it's "drop-in" misses the point. How else are people going to interpret and use "a modern replacement for ls", in practice?

Not to replace the file /bin/ls itself. Users will symlink/PATH/alias exa in as "ls" in front of /bin/ls in their shell for convenience.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#239

Post by userbinator »

cytzol wrote: post #138
tadzik_ wrote: post #42

> 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 fil…

If it's not small, what would you call it?

Self-contained, portable, featureful, etc. There are plenty of other adjectives to say it's not huge or "download tens of megabytes of runtime and scatter files all over your computer".

For me, <64KB is small and <4KB is tiny. But then again, being aware of the demoscene, I've seen what can be done in those size categories... ;-)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#240

Post by zodiac »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #44
kowdermeister wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same at first. ls is good mnemonic for list, but what exa stands for and why three letters? "gf" for example would be better. neighbor characters on the keyboard, could stand for get files.

Furthermore, l and s are typed with different hands, which makes it quite fast to type. Exa is all left-handed, so it takes even longer.

annoyingly, on dvorak ls is typed with the pinky of the right hand for both characters, and then I usually use the same finger to press enter again after
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