4 ms·

It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos. That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is so

by _jal 9y ago

It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos. That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of 'grid' display entirely - reading across just doesn't work for me. Etc. More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I do it so much during the average day that I don't even think about it. Can't say I immediately know every one of the switches, but probably 10 or so variants I use daily are pure muscle memory, and less frequently used things (extended attributes, symlink-deref options, etc.) I can remember without the man page. So in that sense, `ls` is well into the same category as vi for me - I'm so accustomed to whatever warts there may be that switching would be much more painful than any efficiency gain.

raides 9y ago
I do not think I could have said it any better. Absolutely fabulous work to the developer. I am just not his userbase.
- cestith 9y ago
  I might be in his userbase part of the time. It seems exa does have some features I'd find handy once in a while in addition to ls. I think "replacement" is going too far for me. Some of the subthreads talking about actually aliasing 'ls' to 'exa' sound to me like they're going to break some little-known features on their systems. I'm in the "potential supplement" camp I guess.
moxious 9y ago
That muscle memory must have taken quite some time to develop. Here's to a future where the legions of programmers coming down the pike don't have to spend that investment to get the same or better result.
- vacri 9y ago
  What's your proposed method for getting tailored, filtered output to your transient requirements, without expending so much effort as two keypresses?
cytzol 9y ago
Thanks for the kudos! It's absolutely mindboggling how many times I've decided to deviate from one of ls's default settings -- certain that the old way was inferior and outdated, and that the new way will be obvious and immensely popular -- only to find people have no idea why I'm doing things this way! I need the colours to help me scan the output; if I don't see human-readable units, I curse myself for forgetting the flag. But thousands of people don't like this, and it's usually a different set of features with each person, too. I would never have guessed I was so 'out there'! ls is one of the most entrenched pieces of software there is; this is freeing, in a way, because it provides a stable base for people to rely on, leaving exa free to experiment. Everyone who values stability and simplicity most of all won't be switching from ls any time soon, which means I can push exa more in the direction I want it to go. (Fun facts: very early releases of exa didn't have a grid mode at all, just the long mode, because that was the only one I used. So there have been some concessions to popularity :)
- hosh 9y ago
  I use colorized ls by default and get a bit peeved by how I have to jump through hoops to get that on OSX by default. If it works out. i'll probably alias "ls" to "exa" in the future. That said, the binary isn't self-contained (I know, I know) so I was in the middle of compiling it from source before being pulled away for work. Looking forward to trying it.
  - cytzol 9y ago
    > 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!
    - samstave 9y ago
      exa: error while loading shared libraries: libhttp_parser.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
      - deleted 9y ago
ams6110 9y ago
I am pretty much in agreement. I have no complaint about anyone who likes this and wants to use this, but it's not for me. I like utilities that do one thing. ls for listing files. find for finding files and traversing hierarchies. git for dealing with git repos. xargs and pipes and maybe other utilities if I need to glue things together. If I want something fancy, I will use emacs dired mode as a filesystem navigator and magit for git repos. And cynically, if this wasn't written in Rust I don't think it's on the front page.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> 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 universal. 2017-06-17 is easier to parse than "cze 17" (hello, locales).
- Symbiote 9y ago
  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://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Block-size.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Bloc... Time style: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Formatting-file-timestamps.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Form...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Thank you!
- mkesper 9y ago
  Oh and file sizes should all use the same unit for easy comparing (maybe default to MB).

by _jal 9y ago

raides 9y ago

I do not think I could have said it any better. Absolutely fabulous work to the developer. I am just not his userbase.

cestith 9y ago
I might be in his userbase part of the time. It seems exa does have some features I'd find handy once in a while in addition to ls. I think "replacement" is going too far for me. Some of the subthreads talking about actually aliasing 'ls' to 'exa' sound to me like they're going to break some little-known features on their systems. I'm in the "potential supplement" camp I guess.

moxious 9y ago

That muscle memory must have taken quite some time to develop. Here's to a future where the legions of programmers coming down the pike don't have to spend that investment to get the same or better result.

vacri 9y ago
What's your proposed method for getting tailored, filtered output to your transient requirements, without expending so much effort as two keypresses?

cytzol 9y ago

Thanks for the kudos! It's absolutely mindboggling how many times I've decided to deviate from one of ls's default settings -- certain that the old way was inferior and outdated, and that the new way will be obvious and immensely popular -- only to find people have no idea why I'm doing things this way! I need the colours to help me scan the output; if I don't see human-readable units, I curse myself for forgetting the flag. But thousands of people don't like this, and it's usually a different set of features with each person, too. I would never have guessed I was so 'out there'! ls is one of the most entrenched pieces of software there is; this is freeing, in a way, because it provides a stable base for people to rely on, leaving exa free to experiment. Everyone who values stability and simplicity most of all won't be switching from ls any time soon, which means I can push exa more in the direction I want it to go. (Fun facts: very early releases of exa didn't have a grid mode at all, just the long mode, because that was the only one I used. So there have been some concessions to popularity :)

hosh 9y ago
I use colorized ls by default and get a bit peeved by how I have to jump through hoops to get that on OSX by default. If it works out. i'll probably alias "ls" to "exa" in the future. That said, the binary isn't self-contained (I know, I know) so I was in the middle of compiling it from source before being pulled away for work. Looking forward to trying it.
- cytzol 9y ago
  > 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!
  - samstave 9y ago
    exa: error while loading shared libraries: libhttp_parser.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    - deleted 9y ago

ams6110 9y ago

I am pretty much in agreement. I have no complaint about anyone who likes this and wants to use this, but it's not for me. I like utilities that do one thing. ls for listing files. find for finding files and traversing hierarchies. git for dealing with git repos. xargs and pipes and maybe other utilities if I need to glue things together. If I want something fancy, I will use emacs dired mode as a filesystem navigator and magit for git repos. And cynically, if this wasn't written in Rust I don't think it's on the front page.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> 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 universal. 2017-06-17 is easier to parse than "cze 17" (hello, locales).

Symbiote 9y ago
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://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Block-size.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Bloc... Time style: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Formatting-file-timestamps.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Form...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Thank you!
mkesper 9y ago
Oh and file sizes should all use the same unit for easy comparing (maybe default to MB).