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Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

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Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what if they do?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#303
post #8

Does it take into account the background color of my xterm so things do not become unreadable?

Doesn't look like it, but the github page [1] has screenshots on both light and dark backgrounds, and the colors appear to have been selected to work well on both light and dark backgrounds (like the Solarized color theme). From the doc, it doesn't appear that colors are customizable, yet. Pull request? :) [1] https://github.com/ogham/exa

Yes, I was about to mention http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

Worthy start for a default and you might want to contribute an exa config / env variable setting to solarized.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#304
post #202
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.

Nice! I just downloaded it here ... My suggestion is to include an option to list the hidden files (dot files) as well as some file sorting options in the next version of Exa. ;-)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#305
To the author: As you are already making a much more user and human friendly version of ls (like making ls -h the default behavior) please consider placing the name of the file on the left most column

   inode Permissions Links  Size Blocks User Group Date Modified Name
21214836 .rw-r--r-- 1 9.4Ki 24 ben staff 29 Jun 16:16 Cargo.lock

As a human I first care for the name, Currently I'm forced to scan the right most column (which position varies) and then travel back to the beginning of the line and read the rest of the metadata

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#308

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…

It would be nice if it implemented the exact same set of command line flags as ls plus whatever else it does. That way I'd be able to use it as a replacement when I type 'ls', much as 'vi' fires up 'vim'.

Typing commands like 'ls -ltra' are already muscle memory to me and that takes effort to change.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#309
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Interesting. Why does it need an HTTP parser?! Some accidental dependency maybe?

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#310
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Sure, I'm largely aware of how colorblindness works (my father is colorblind and my friend is colorblind and I've discussed it multiple times with each). I'm really looking for whether experiencially you, or the root comment, have experienced good color schemes that work well within the constraints you impose, and whether that alters the statement slightly from "it should not default to color" to "it should not default to color unless done well".

I understand that the answer may be different for different people in somewhat non-subjective ways, since there are different types of colorblindness.

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