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Show HN: Facad – A colorful directory listing tool for the command line
Facad is about functionality, not just aesthetics. Key features:
- Intuitive file type representation
- Smart sorting (directories first, then by extension)
- Four-column layout for quick directory analysis
It evolved from this alias:
alias ls='ls -A -F --group-directories-first --sort=extension --color=always'
Facad takes this concept further, offering more flexibility and visual clarity.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codedokode 2y agoRegarding emojis: I believe they should be monochrome in console. The problem is that when you have text with emojis they stand out too much and distract you. So they should be monochrome, not so large and not so standing out.
- stouset 2y agoDo most emoji actually look decent in monochrome in practice?
- seanw444 2y agoUnless they mean a completely new style of emoji to complement the monochrome, then I'd say no. Flattening existing emojis to one color would probably be awful.
- sanex 2y agoLike some of the random notification icons on Android that are just a circle. Useless.
- lolinder 2y agoYou'd get an emoji font specifically designed to be monochrome: https://emojipedia.org/noto-emoji https://emojipedia.org/noto-emoji
- uniq7 2y agoYou can configure your terminal to use a custom font with monochrome emojis.
- klardotsh 2y agoSometimes... one of the biggest problems with TUIs is that every terminal emulator is extremely opinionated about how it wants to render anything that isn't trivial ASCII, even in 2024. Sometimes you can select color emojis. Sometimes you can't turn OFF color emojis. Sometimes you can set font preferences to use something like FSD Emoji [1] where possible and fall back to other fonts, sometimes you can only set a single font. Don't get me started on box drawing characters and, worse than any of the above, ligatures (which most open-source terminals have either a religious aversion to at the expense of their users, or refuse to implement any solution that doesn't meet the performance bar similar to non-ligatured font rendering, which functionally means we'll probably never see ligature support in those terminals). My dream UI I think might be "every window is FLTK/FOX/other lightweight UI toolkit (maybe that one Rust tools like `amdtop` use?), strictly adheres to a system-wide theming protocol (a-la GTK2, most QTs, etc) that provides a highly consistent human interface, and provides Vim-style bindings and a `:command` bar and otherwise pretends to be a terminal window in all ways except the "actually being a monospace character grid" part. In other words: a GUI that pretends mice were never invented (or rather - makes them fully optional and interchangeable with the keyboard). But instead we have the stupid modern UI dichotomy of "keyboard fans have to fit their lives into a character grid, mice fans have to deal with shipping all of Chromium and not one single app on the system looking even remotely like any of the others, and keyboard support is unpredictable at best". [1]: https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/fsd-emoji/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/fsd-emoji/ , note that it's woefully incomplete and honestly this ends up creating an even more jarring experience than just using color Noto/Twemoji everywhere.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- drdaeman 2y agoLooks nice! I think it would be cool to know the differences between Facad, lsd, and eza (https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd and https://github.com/eza-community/eza https://github.com/eza-community/eza) aka "why do I want to try Facad rather than alternatives". No offense meant, but the latter two already exist for a while, available in most distros and seem to do at least approximately the same thing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 2y agoApparently Facad is much smaller, less feature-rich, written in C (both lsd and eza are written in Rust), and uses slightly more permissive license (MIT).
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- bbor 2y agoAlso, AFAICT both of those offer icons, not emojis — though at least lsd is open to manual configuration. Cute, either way! This is a way more fun way to waste time than comparing IDE fonts, thanks for sharing. Will have to try out all three tonight
- mmh0000 2y agoWhat is the benefit of sorting on extensions? Since extensions have no meaning to the kernel and, only a few oddball applications (tar, gzip) care about extensions. The emojis are cute, but is it really quicker than reading a `-`, `d`, or `l` in the ls output? This is my daily goto: alias ls='ls -Av --time-style="+%Y-%h-%d %r" --group-directories-first --color' alias ll='ls -lh'
- anigbrowl 2y agoI always sort on extensions. I want to know what things are and group similar things together.
- shric 2y agoI usually group similar type things into directories so that I don't get much of an extension mix. The exception is my download directory and for that I generally want to order by time or size.
- Tagbert 2y agoI always group by project. The OS can handle different file types in a folder. I need to be able to archive a folder and have all of the files regardless of file types.
- IgorPartola 2y agoSomething like photos processed by darktable are a good example of why this isn’t always practical. You have your raw files and your sidecar files side by side. You could separate them in settings I suspect but that’s not the default and god forbid you ever lose one. If you are in the habit of putting JPEGs in the same place you really want to separate by extension.
- kristopolous 2y agoIdeally are we talking extension or mime here and if it's the latter, how far down do you slice? Do we separate our PNGs from our JPEGs?
- lelandbatey 2y agoWhy four column and not one column? If I add a new file that's longer than the old ones, the columns will re-flow and now where I used to look is no longer where I was looking, it's moved off to the side. Why not have just a single column so your eye only has to move in a single direction to find things, a-la `ls -alh` ? Note I often wonder about bare `ls` usage for the same reason; it always seemed terrible to me, hence why I never type 'ls' and instead always use the `ll` alias (though I've customized it from the default that Ubuntu gave me over a decade ago).
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoA huge amount of wasted horizontal space would be the main reason I guess. Me, I prefer a `-l` most of the time though, personally.
- kccqzy 2y agoI don't like emojis in this context. I like them when humans use them to communicate over text when facial expressions and such aren't available. I feel weirded out when a computer program sprouts emojis at me. A computer program needs to treat human users with respect, and emojis convey the wrong tone. Like languages with T-V distinction, emojis strictly belong to the T form and are unsuitable for communication from a computer program to a human. This made me recall that I have `export HOMEBREW_NO_EMOJI=1` in my shell startup. I wish all programs provide me with an opt out like this for this misfeature.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Supermancho 2y ago> I like them when humans use them to communicate over text when facial expressions and such aren't available. I believe emoji is shorthand for a tableau of common iconography. This is useful, because it is not limited to an OS specified set, allowing for user expansion and culture to determine the core set. The folder icon, itself, is an emoji in this context.
- bbor 2y agoI encourage you to try to move past it, you’re missing out! Of all the arbitrary cultural norms, “computers should only use icons, not emojis” is the most arbitrary. No offense ofc, and I believe you that the psychological effect is real — I’m just saying it’s probably an arbitrary one that would go away pretty quickly. Personally, “output a concise, hierarchical markdown document with heavy usage of emojis” is a must-have LLM pre-prompt. Helps with scanning the results quickly, and I have a hunch it helps it keep its reasoning straight for complex tasks.
- sgarland 2y agoHard pass. I want my terminal to present me with text, and only text. That way, as I cry bitter tears of defeat, the textual output will remain, stolidly presenting its harsh reality to me. Emoji would falsely present an aura of hope and congeniality where there is only pain; the cruel reminder that I have once again failed to live up to its inflexible and demanding expectations. …seriously though, I have absolutely no desire for emoji in the terminal.
- 0xfeba 2y agoHow do you pronounce the name?
- nullbyte 2y agoLord Farquad
- flyingcircus3 2y agoI assume its pronounced the same as "facade" - an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant reality.
- airstrike 2y agoWhich is really "façade", but oh well
- jshen 2y agoI can never get icons to work on remote machines when I SSH in. Is there some doc or blog explaining how this stuff works?
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- srockets 2y agoBut can you use it to play Flappy Bird[0]? -- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSNWkdvoRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSNWkdvoRo
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- ok123456 2y agoHardcoding the ANSI escape characters hurts portability. Try looking up the escape using termcap/terminfo.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jstanley 2y agoHurts portability to what? Maybe it once did, but now it's akin to complaining that a program misbehaves on EBCDIC systems.
- ok123456 2y agoFor instance, if you detect that it's not going to a terminal, but rather a pipe, you probably don't want terminal escape codes and want the dumb terminal entry.
- ilaksh 2y agoNice. There is also 'exa'.
- elashri 2y agoexa is unmaintained, you can use the active fork eza instead [1]. [1] https://github.com/eza-community/eza https://github.com/eza-community/eza
- microbugged 2y ago[dead]
- lolinder 2y agoI like it! The emojis make it really easy to identify files at a glance—with more precision than the simple `d` and `l` indicators in ls.
- imbnwa 2y ago>alias ls='ls -A -F --group-directories-first --sort=extension --color=always' Stupid macOS ls binary: unrecognized option `--group-directories-first'
- jeffhuys 2y agoUse brew to install gnu coreutils…
- tambourine_man 2y agoNot stupid, just BSD heritage, not GNU. See FreeBSD
- mprovost 2y agoAnother comment was arguing that anything since POSIX is a "waste of time", presumably including the GNU extensions. (The BSD utilities were the first "user-friendly" alternatives to the original AT&T versions...)
- motohagiography 2y agothe idea of having emojis in the terminal opens up the conceptual possibility of publishing web like applications that are navigable by a basic shell DSL and no browser.
- specialist 2y agoA REPL for the hypermedia? Intriquing idea. I'd probably go for something like that.
- skeptrune 2y agoI'm so for this. I wish more things came as a TUI. More emojis seem great. Makes it much easier for folks who don't work in the terminal consistency to use it.
- grugagag 2y agoThis is cool. I’d fancy a set of command line tools that drop you briefly into simple TUIs to make discoverability and composition intuitive. Something like fish or zsh but more advanced a few notches.
- tovej 2y agoWould a commander type TUI work for you? https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc https://github.com/ranger/ranger https://github.com/ranger/ranger https://github.com/jarun/nnn https://github.com/jarun/nnn There's also superfile and broot. Personally I feel like they try to do a little too much, but that doesn't mean they won't work for you: https://github.com/yorukot/superfile https://github.com/yorukot/superfile https://github.com/Canop/broot https://github.com/Canop/broot
- romwell 2y agoI should add the venerable FAR Manager to the list: https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en It's Windows-based, but has been open-sourced by the developer, and so it's got a Linux port[1]. The UI is the closest in spirit to Norton Commander[2], which is what inspired them all (and where the term "command-style TUI" comes from). On the off-beat, the time is ripe for someone to fork one of these 2-pane split commanders, and brand it "Hawk TUI: Split On That Thing"(c). [1] https://github.com/elfmz/far2l https://github.com/elfmz/far2l [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
- scudsworth 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fsckboy 2y agowhat does it mean to pipe the output? if it doesn't mean anything, complete fail. (piping the output of ls should also mean something better than it means, but you aren't improving ls if you don't improve that) try midnight commander, seems like that's what you want to replace
- umbra07 2y agothis isn't an 'mc' replacement, this is an 'ls' replacement for traditional-style terminal use.
- mafriese 2y agoIs this in any way better than eza? https://github.com/eza-community/eza https://github.com/eza-community/eza
- thelibrarian 2y agoI guess if you prefer emoji over Nerd Font icons?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 2y agoTIL eza is a continuation of exa
- dhruvkb 2y agoI would love to see if you would try `pls` and provide your thoughts? Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of the project. [pls]: https://pls.cli.rs https://pls.cli.rs
- tovej 2y agoFeels like there are a lot of fancy human-used terminal listing tools these days, and to me all of them feel like a waste of time. 1) There's so many assumptions made about the terminals and fonts these will run in. Are you really using emojis in your terminal workflows? And if so, why? do you sacrifice monospace for it? do you expect the tool to work on a new system (or remote system)? 2) What are you missing in ls? Can your tool even do all that ls can? If you need to sift through a lot of files, why are you listing files in the terminal? Why not use a search tool, terminal or graphical. 3) Your tool is not mandated by POSIX, ls is. ls will survive as long as we have Unix-like OSes, it will always be available in all Unix-like OSes. Your tool will survive as long as the maintainer feels like maintaining it. In the end, if someone wants to develop an ls-like tool just to get the experience of designing, developing, and maintaining software, I'm all for it. But the technical reasons for adopting this are slim to none. I do also want to say that a more structured API for machine readable listing of files and certain attributes could be very useful (mime type, project specific file type data, e.g. OpenAPI schema lookup, special magic bytes, etc), but that that is a different type of project than these yassified ls clones.
- dadarecit 2y agoyou must be fun at parties
- tovej 2y agoI would like to think that I am. But we're discussing a technical topic on an industry forum, not at a party. This site is still named hacker news, I would assume software projects should be discussed from a hacker's point of view.
- atorodius 2y agoSome strawman arguments IMHO 1) if it works it works. I guess most people use a small set of terminals these days (ie 80% of users probably use 20% or less of terminals) 2) can just use ls if needed. The tool does not need to be a superset to be useful 3) most people use these on a few devices they own and where they can install non-posix tools. Are all programs you use posix? Seems wild
- sp0ck 2y agoMy ls alternative: alias ls 'exa -lh --color always --group-directories-first --icons' alias tree 'exa --tree -L3 --long'
- yencabulator 2y agoFYI exa is unmaintained, you want eza these days. Link in the exa repo (some of the eza people have push access to exa repo, but can't touch the website etc).
- dhruvkb 2y agoI would love to see if you would try `pls` and provide your thoughts? Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of the project. [pls]: https://pls.cli.rs https://pls.cli.rs
- y-f-honeyguide 2y agoHello everyone, 1) Thank you all for your support and feedback. All the questions you've asked are the same ones the skeptical part of me posed during development. And all the answers given are those my sanguine side provided (and even better). 2) I'm excited to announce that facad 2.1.0 is now available! This update includes two new features: -l, --long display detailed directory listing -a, --analytics display directory analytics I've also added emoji-based visual representation of file permissions for improved clarity. You can see these updates in action in the screenshots on the GitHub release page: https://github.com/yellow-footed-honeyguide/facad/releases/tag/v2.1.0 3) If you have any ideas for useful additions or features, please don't hesitate to share them. I would also greatly appreciate any advice on maintaining and growing an open-source project. Thank you again for your interest in facad!