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Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

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Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#261

Post by flukus »

burntsushi wrote: post #208
flukus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said that the argument of size is a bit silly to begin with, especially for a 3MB binary. For a single app, sure it's no problem, but what about when the thousands of other programs in bin introduce similar levels of bloat? Another one is ripgrep, weighing in at 5MB compared to greps 204kb. And this is just for fairly simple command line tools, Imagine what life will be like when we have UI toolkits like…

> Another one is ripgrep, weighing in at 5MB compared to greps 204kb. Did you strip both binaries? If I strip rg after compiling it, it shrinks to 2.7MB on Linux. If I strip the distributed binary on Github (which is statically linked with musl), then it shrinks to 2.4MB. > Imagine what life will be like when we have UI toolkits like QT statically compiled into everything I imagine Qt will be dynamically linked, so I…

> Did you strip both binaries?

No, should I have to? I'm just looking at the published binary sizes.

> I imagine Qt will be dynamically linked, so I'm not sure why you'd say that.

I said like Qt, as in something similar written in rust. The Qt5 GUI module weighs in at about 10MB, if every gui program included it plus all the other libs then the bloat quickly adds up.

> But that has nothing to do with Rust.

Until rust has a stable ABI that doesn't require everything be statically linked it's a rust problem.

Love the brigading the rust community always does btw. Apparently someone was triggered enough to go through my comment history downvoting.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#262

Post by h1d »

cytzol wrote: post #203
mavhc wrote: post #19

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

Well it's too late to change now! It's one-handed, even on Dvorak, which is a bit annoying. I don't think it's too much of an ask for people to define their own aliases for it, though. The overlap between people who install custom command-line tools and people who know how to edit their shell config can't be small.

If it was for the sake of usability, "asd" was far easier to type than "exa" where my fingers have to dance around when the name doesn't mean anything anyway.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#263

Post by jbooth »

userbinator wrote: post #244
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #148

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. Even though I might not use it, this looks like an awesome project - kudos to the author for finding (& implementing) ways to improve something as mundane as ls. I've long been stuck on finding a suitable (perfect?) project idea to play with Rust but exa is making me think through again! Thanks for sharing this and also for your screencasts. I'd definitely spend a laz…

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. I wonder if a lot of that has to do with how it's being "marketed" --- it might just be me, but whenever I see "modern" being used to describe something, it evokes the negative connotations of being trendy, fashionable, boring, vapid, fleeting, style-over-substance that's all too common with software today (Windows' "modern UI/Metro" being one of the first examples to…

I did some nodejs work the other month, pinch-hitting in a product crunch, we're using grunt.

`grunt test`.. ooh, so pretty and creative! `grunt test > test.out`, wtf, why is my file full of control character bullshit?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#264

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#265

Post by rndmize »

userbinator wrote: post #244
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #148

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. Even though I might not use it, this looks like an awesome project - kudos to the author for finding (& implementing) ways to improve something as mundane as ls. I've long been stuck on finding a suitable (perfect?) project idea to play with Rust but exa is making me think through again! Thanks for sharing this and also for your screencasts. I'd definitely spend a laz…

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. I wonder if a lot of that has to do with how it's being "marketed" --- it might just be me, but whenever I see "modern" being used to describe something, it evokes the negative connotations of being trendy, fashionable, boring, vapid, fleeting, style-over-substance that's all too common with software today (Windows' "modern UI/Metro" being one of the first examples to…

Given how half the comments are complaining about the colors and there's a whole thread on whether 3MB is "small" or not... I doubt it.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#267

Post by userbinator »

kbenson wrote: post #176
khedoros1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, right, 180cm would be a customary way to show that (probably wouldn't be shot for saying 1.8m either). And 32GB for an SD card, or whatever. But then you run into the case that the "32GB" SD image that you just dd'd won't copy to another card of the same nominal size, because it turns out that the destination card has reduced capacity due to 100KB of bad sectors, or something. Or your file went from 2100 bytes…

I think what's really in discussion here is what the default should be. ls was originally conceived and implemented in a period when all the files you would be dealing with could be measured in bytes easily, and would almost never be over four digits. Many common files today (any MP3, most word processing documents, almost every image except for thumbnails, etc) are nine or more digits, and at that level it's very ea…

Many common files today (any MP3, most word processing documents, almost every image except for thumbnails, etc) are nine or more digits

I think your perception of filesizes is slightly skewed; "nine or more digits" means roughly >=100MB. Disk images, software, and videos would be in that range, but probably not the average MP3 (100MB of 320k MP3 is over 40 minutes), and I don't think I've ever handled a "word processing document" more than a few dozen MB --- and even that would already be many hundreds of pages.

Of the files sitting on my desktop at the moment, which is not necessarily representative nor typical but covers a wide range of types (pdf, mp3, zip, exe, jpg, mp4, ...), slightly more than 10% are 10MB or more (8 digits), ~15% have 7 digits (1-9MB), and the rest are below 1MB (<= 6 digits).

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#268

Post by jolux »

jsjohnst wrote: post #254
jayvanguard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, interesting! Mine is writing a simple web server (sockets, IO, string handling) and an ultra-simple command line browser (args handling, 3rd party libs for URLs, HTML parsing, etc.)

Mine in similar, I implement an authoritative domain name server. I've done it in something like 20-25 languages now. The only language I've learned in the last decade I didn't write one in is ARM Assembly. I am not that "dedicated" (more like masochistic) enough to try to do one in assembly.

I tend to reimplement the Linux kernel from scratch a few times in every language and go from there onto the X server, desktop environment, networking stack, etc.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#269

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

userbinator wrote: post #244
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #148

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. Even though I might not use it, this looks like an awesome project - kudos to the author for finding (& implementing) ways to improve something as mundane as ls. I've long been stuck on finding a suitable (perfect?) project idea to play with Rust but exa is making me think through again! Thanks for sharing this and also for your screencasts. I'd definitely spend a laz…

Wow, the comments in this thread are quite harsh. I wonder if a lot of that has to do with how it's being "marketed" --- it might just be me, but whenever I see "modern" being used to describe something, it evokes the negative connotations of being trendy, fashionable, boring, vapid, fleeting, style-over-substance that's all too common with software today (Windows' "modern UI/Metro" being one of the first examples to…

Maybe. Whether the term "modern" was used or not, my hunch is that the response would be the same, for it is forbidden for one to deign to make these kinds of changes to fundamental Unix commands, and is tantamount to a kind of heresy (never mind that GNU implementations did this all the time wrt. original Unix implementations).

Religion... never cared for it. Re-invent the whole crappy (though still less crappy than alternatives) Unix command line, I say.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#270

Post by II2II »

kbenson wrote: post #211
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?…

From my experience as a colorblind person, the use of color to convey information falls into several categories.

1. It improves the presentation of information. The vast majority of colorblind can still see color. In this respect, we are no different from people who have normal color vision.

2. It has no impact upon the presentation of information. In these cases, the colors may not be distinguishable but there are other cues that convey information. I typically think of these cues as context. An example of context relevant to to exa is the column or character used to represent the information.

3. It degrades the information being presented. In addition to there being different types of colorblindness, each type seems to be variable. That is to say that most colorblind persons aren't actually blind to a particular color, they are simply less sensitive to that color. This means that they may be able to see a color if it is intense. Using colored text is really bad in this respect since it is typically less intense, likely due to a small number of pixels being illuminated. This reduces the legibility of text to varying degrees.

4. It makes information illegible. This is essentially the extreme version of case 3. This happens when the contrast is so low that color is the main distinguishing factor, so it may be nearly impossible to distinguish two adjacent colors (such as foreground and background colors for text).

Take anything that I say at face value. It is largely based upon personal experience. The only thing that I can say with certainty is that colorblind people see color differently. I suspect that people with normal color vision suffer from similar issues to colorblind individuals. It simply manifests itself in a standard way so that there are standard design methods to avoid it. Of course colorblind people throw a wrench into the works because their vision is calibrate in different ways due to their sensitivity to each color.

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