Live data from Hacker News

Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

351–360 of 420 posts

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#351
post #75

It feels like swiss army knife of 'ls' that tries to do everything in one, and I hope more features are added, such as showing directory size, which would be a killer feature. I hate using 'du' or 'ncdu'. I installed in Ubuntu (and WSL) by downloading the zip file and also 1 dependency by `sudo apt-get install libgit2-24' Edit: It's also fast, and I'm beginning to think Rust is really good for making speedy commandli…

> I hate using 'du' Why? On the other hand, I like to have small tools that do one thing and do it well, and that you can combine to do more powerful things. Personal preference, I guess.

In my case the problem is I'm running out of disk space and need to find stuff to delete. So, `du -csh `. Wow, three huge directories. `cd dir1; du -csh `. Repeat. `du -d 3` would seem to be the solution, but it is pretty noisy. I really want something that prints all the "big" stuff in a tree, nicely indented and sorted by size. I end up using a KDE app ported to macOS that shows all the big files in packed rectangles, but can't remember the name.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#352
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What colour "blue" should be is something that isn't going to ever satisfy everyone.

* http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_b...

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#353
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be fair, they could avoid that by checking if stdout is a TTY or not.

That's an amateur hour mistake on their part, frankly. I hope they have a 'switch color off' flag.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#354
post #350

I've been using k [1] to get pretty much the same functionalities but, being written in zsh, it's terribly slow. Your program looks nice but I would love to have an output closer to k in term of colour [2], at the moment it feels way to noisy to me. [1] https://github.com/supercrabtree/k [2] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supercrabtree/k/gh-pages/f...

I've seen k before, it's pretty neat.

You can't grey out the columns in exa until I land configurable colours, which I hope to get done relatively soonish. But you can use the --colour-scale (or --color-scale) option to colour file sizes based on how big they are. The person who submitted the feature request (https://github.com/ogham/exa/issues/65) used k as a direct example.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amen! (:giggles:)

I doubly agree for reinventing fundamentals or attempting to. To be fair, given how resilient unix tools have been, this following and to some extent the harshness is to be expected, I think

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#357

>although Rust is cross-platform, I don’t have a Windows machine to develop on... Well, Windows VMs aren't hard to come by and they work quite well on any host platform (contrarily to some other OSes cough MacOS cough ) A native windows version would be interesting, though I believe people generally shun any prolonged interactive use the windows command line, this kind of tool might be one of the possible remedies ag…

The developer in me jumps with joy when the existence of (us poor) devs on Windows is acknowledged and gosh, even prioritized ("no v1.0 before windows"). I'm a fan for you just saying that!

PS: I develop on Windows

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#358

>although Rust is cross-platform, I don’t have a Windows machine to develop on... Well, Windows VMs aren't hard to come by and they work quite well on any host platform (contrarily to some other OSes cough MacOS cough ) A native windows version would be interesting, though I believe people generally shun any prolonged interactive use the windows command line, this kind of tool might be one of the possible remedies ag…

As a maintainer of a CLI program in Rust that runs on Windows, it is mostly a pretty nice experience. The only painful part was getting colors working in both MSYS terminals and cmd/PowerShell based terminals. I do have a Windows 7 VM setup for testing, but I also bought a cheap Windows 10 laptop to test on as well.

You should probably write to exa developer, no? Perhaps, help out a fellow tool developer to bring the goodness of your tools to us devs on Windows? :)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they could avoid that by checking if stdout is a TTY or not.

That's an amateur hour mistake on their part, frankly. I hope they have a 'switch color off' flag.

Welcome to the JavaScript ecosystem.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#360
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The unix philosophy is a great idea, but it doesn't really lead to a good experience. Glad people are making more integrated tools! Bit ironical, as ls already is pretty "non-unixy" and has way too many features tacked into it. From purism point of view it would make more sense that ls would be just a list of files and let other utilities (stat, sort, etc) handle the rest.

That would be great. Probably about 40% of all issues in bash scripts I see is people trying to parse ls because they don't know other tools. It would be amazing if ls reigned in the features some so people learned better tools.

That's got UX backwards. You'd want to minimize the effort user has to make, no?
Post reply on HN