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Exa, a modern replacement for ls

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Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#321

Post by mcbits »

ordu wrote: post #314
mcbits wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how you actually type, or are you speculating? With regular home row typing, e-x-a is 3-4-5, which are the hardest fingers to "drum", and even harder on three different rows. I've tried micro-optimizing special cases like this before, but then I have to think as much about typing as what I'm typing. On the other hand, I know I've hit "sl" by mistake more than a few times.

> e-x-a is 3-4-5, which are the hardest fingers to "drum", and even harder on three different rows. Its because of the rules of blind typeing courses that says thumb should be used only for space? If you got such a courses more than a year before and already mastered blind typeing, than stop worrying. Just use thumb for `x`. > I've tried micro-optimizing special cases like this before, but then I have to think as muc…

My fingers are pretty well trained for typing - around 100 WPM, 120 on a good day. As I say, I've tried tweaking my technique for special cases, but it just makes typing more laborious for little or no gain.

It could be different for others. I saw a guy who could do 100 WPM with literally two fingers, although it looked exhausting. A year of waking up with my fingers locked, simultaneously numb and throbbing in pain, taught me that maintaining a relaxed flow is more important than those last 10 WPM. But that means a few combinations like e-x-a will be tap-tap-tap instead of t-t-tap.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#322

Post by Symbiote »

khedoros1 wrote: post #62

> For example, exa prints human-readable file sizes by default (when would you not want that?) When I've got two similar but non-identical files, and I think that the difference between their sizes might be important. That's a silly nitpick, though. It's not like I lose ls by installing exa. Plus, it's a nice excuse to see if I can get cargo working around the corporate firewall.

I'll repeat this here:

  export TIME_STYLE=long-iso
  export BLOCK_SIZE="'1"
The first option gives ISO dates, the second the thousands separator. You need a locale for a thousands separator, en_GB here:

  $ ls -on i*
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 1001     1,335 2017-06-16 14:31 icon-shelters.svg
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,633,946 2016-11-07 14:50 insects.png
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,445,837 2016-11-18 10:32 ix
Block size: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Bloc...

Time style: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Form...

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#324

Post by TeMPOraL »

Symbiote wrote: post #318
TeMPOraL wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> defaulting to relative units, ditto. One thing I always wanted to remove from `ls` is the default "human-like" display of dates and times (which `exa`, unfortunately, seems to inherit). This is IMO just annoying (and replacing time with year, if it differs from current, just plain stupid; and don't get me started about the "bright" idea of using locales there!). We have ISO-8601 for a reason. It's readable and univ…

export TIME_STYLE=long-iso I found this option whilst investigating why most locales were honoured, but en_GB still gave American (backwards) dates. I also have this, for the thousands-comma display: export BLOCK_SIZE="'1" $ ls -on i* -rw-rw-r-- 1 1001 1,335 2017-06-16 14:31 icon-shelters.svg -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,633,946 2016-11-07 14:50 insects.png -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,445,837 2016-11-18 10:32 ix Block size: https://w…

Thank you!

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#325

Post by andrewflnr »

There's only one problem with this thing: all the characters are on one hand with a qwerty keyboard! A bit more annoying than ls, where you can practically hit the keys simultaneously. (You want to nitpick the colors, do you? I'll show you what real bikeshedding is...) In all seriousness, though, it looks good.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#326

Post by Symbiote »

h1d wrote: post #262
cytzol wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  alias asd=exa
I already have

  alias h=ls
  alias hh='ls -l'
  alias lrt='ls -lrt'
  alias lrta='ls -lrta'
(The first two because I use Dvorak, in which case I'd use 'aoe' instead of 'asd'.)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#327

Post by bipson »

unkown-unknowns wrote: post #317
inopinatus wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest describing it as a "colourful alternative" rather than a "modern replacement", because no-one will be removing /bin/ls with exa installed. "Replacement" strongly implies removal of the thing being replaced, as with "replacement hip", "replacement CEO" etc. As for why anyone might feel aggrieved about replacement of core Unix services, my mind immediately drew a (possibly unfair, but emotionally comparable…

> because no-one will be removing /bin/ls with exa installed. Why not? I would.

Yeah, that's the thing: built in gnu tools might be used by other tools/scripts/etc. - if you're ls isn't there or delivers unexpected output, they will fail miserably or cause havoc

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#328

Post by mmarx »

andrewflnr wrote: post #325

There's only one problem with this thing: all the characters are on one hand with a qwerty keyboard! A bit more annoying than ls, where you can practically hit the keys simultaneously. (You want to nitpick the colors, do you? I'll show you what real bikeshedding is...) In all seriousness, though, it looks good.

> There's only one problem with this thing: all the characters are on one hand with a qwerty keyboard!

They are also all on the left hand in both Dvorak and Neo.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#329

Post by bipson »

dheera wrote: post #308
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…

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.

oh great, but shouldn't it then also behave exactly like ls does, i.e. deliver the same output whenever a script of yours or somebody else calls ls and expects a certain output?

oh wait, I know what behaves exactly the same way: ls

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#330

Post by efreak »

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…

I think you mean 6 or more digits? I have yet to see a multigigabyte document. Even mp3s that size are extremely rare.

Even then, most of my documents are quite a bit smaller, as I have a tendency to write my documents in wordpad instead of office, and then save as rtf or txt.

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