Actually, I did at first look into this kind of a modification of GNU ls, but its internal concepts of how to classify files is just not amenable to generalizat

Actually, I did at first look into this kind of a modification of GNU ls, but its internal concepts of how to classify files is just not amenable to generalization along the lines of https://github.com/c-blake/lc https://github.com/c-blake/lc . Basically, the patch would be to thoroughly overhaul guts of the command and libraries it uses and be so unclean that starting from scratch is better, even if you wanted to "stay in C". It's not like the patch would be installed 100% of the time anyway, and shell aliases can paper over divergent installations. So, it's 100% fine if none of these features matter to you - to each his own indeed - but I thought your point deserved a reply. (EDIT: also, `lc` is < 1000 lines of pretty tabular Nim code; Nim is a very high productivity language; exa and GNU ls are both effectively like 10x more code, IIRC. But yeah, you do need to have the Nim compiler installed)