Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exa, a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 420 posts

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#361

Post by urbanj »

prewett wrote: post #351
hk__2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rectangl…

Try ncdu - https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

It's quite useful and fast

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#362

Post by thecrazyone »

cannam wrote: post #73
twic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an unreasonable and unquenchable hatred for developers who assume that their users have dark-background terminals. Honestly, the most insanely passionate contempt.

Drives me a bit nuts too, and I would disagree with some of the other things in this page as well (e.g. the preference for "human-readable" file sizes). But there is a great joy in being able to release a new utility and say about it, "This is how it should work." It reflects your own desires, you understand it, you made the decisions that went into it and have actually thought about the alternatives. There's a delig…

Cool windows manager :thumbsup:

Tilting my head every time I wanted to read a title, I didn't fancy though :)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#363

Post by thecrazyone »

cytzol wrote: post #123
amelius wrote: post #8

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

I have a zillion iTerm profiles configured with popular colour schemes for testing with both light and dark ones. You're covered.

Wow! That's a bold statement to make. I wish I get a chance to make such a statement to a user about a tool I made. A hat tip to you sir! :)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#364

Post by fnj »

masklinn wrote: post #337
Symbiote wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/cor…

Sadly not supported by BSD ls.

True, but if you "pkg install gnuls" and set up an alias, you can get gnu ls transparently.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#365

Post by thecrazyone »

cytzol wrote: post #157
pbiggar wrote: post #14

This is really cool - bringing the great treatment of `ack` to ls. And can confirm how fast it is! The unix philosophy is a great idea, but it doesn't really lead to a good experience. Glad people are making more integrated tools! Oh, and It's in homebrew already: `brew install exa`

When I release a new version of exa, I upload the code and binaries to GitHub, and then someone else whom I have never met but very much appreciate takes it and publishes it to Homebrew, then a few days later I download and start using it. It's the slowest file copy mechanism I've ever used!

You should buy that person a beer if you ever find out who it is.

Plot twist: What if it turns out that it was you all along! :O A la Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde :)

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#366

Post by fnj »

II2II wrote: post #270
kbenson wrote: post #211

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…

Point 4 is the overriding problem. I have never been able to find a color scheme that works acceptable for text on light background and for text on dark background. It is virtually impossible to find a good pleasing and legible color scheme that works just on text on a light background.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#367

Post by cytzol »

turnspike wrote: post #275
cytzol wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Configurable colours are something I'd like to get done, too. About half the work has been done to achieve this -- none of the colours are hard-coded, they're all looked up from a big Colours value that gets passed around internally. This value just needs an interface so it's configurable by the user. I've been meaning to open it up to the community instead of just defining an ad-hoc EXA_COLO[U]RS environment…

I'd settle for a flag that disables the rainbow perms, it seems to be a common gripe. It's nearly a dealbreaker for me. But, that's personal preference - congrats on a great util.

Cheers. Yeah, most of the comments on the colours have mentioned the permissions column in particular!

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#368

Post by executesorder66 »

tomsthumb wrote: post #110
TakerofVita wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it can be typed easily with one hand. At least it has that going for it

"easily" It's top row, bottom row, middle row, and the 'x' on a normal keyboard is half way to being directly under the 'e'. Very awkward and antithetical to the ideas of people who have designed keyboard layouts specifically for efficiency and ergonomics. The only demographic that comes to mind which would find that hand position "natural" would be guitarists and other string players.

I've been playing stringed instruments for more than 10 years. The 'e' 'x' combination is probably the most spastic and slowest key combination on a qwerty keyboard. I type about 100 WPM, so typing exa doesn't take _that_ long. But it feels like it's at least 5 times slower than typing ls. Which would be really annoying for a command that you'd be typing all day.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#369

Post by cytzol »

Dowwie wrote: post #349

This is great. I'm switching to exa! I had high hopes with this command but found the git features missing: exa -l --git --time-style=long-iso -T Nonetheless, this displays Hopefully, the author finds this worth the time to support..

Yo. What's it display? Feel free to raise a bug if something doesn't look right. I know it's not the fastest-moving open-source project, but I'll still read everything that people submit.

Re: Exa, a modern replacement for ls

#370

Post by fnj »

twic wrote: post #40
amelius wrote: post #8

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

I have an unreasonable and unquenchable hatred for developers who assume that their users have dark-background terminals. Honestly, the most insanely passionate contempt.

Sounds a bit extreme, but I am always puzzled by people who think dark backgrounds are just fine. Light all the way for me!

What would people think if all web pages on the internet had ugly black backgrounds?

Post reply on HN