Eza: A modern, maintained replacement for ls

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

by alexzeitler • 2 years ago

291 229 2 years ago

github.com

zeristor• 2 years ago

I just found this after I noticed support had stopped for exa.

isatty• 2 years ago

Why is why I’ll never be using any of these as the default.

ls works, is not mission critical (you know what I mean), and will always be around.

alabhyajindal• 2 years ago

My ls usage went down 100% after I switched to fish shell. The built in Alt + l command lists the directory contents. Very helpful! And also results in a cleaner shell history.

tormeh• 2 years ago

Also many shells come with greatly improved ls implementations built in, like that of nushell.

fsiefken2• 2 years ago

yes, but the good thing is that you don't have switch shells with this. I'm running nushell on windows, which is nice, but I haven't got it as concise with $env.config.table.mode = "none", it also doesn't feature the tree display

jiehong4• 2 years ago

I cannot find this shortcut in https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html.

Do you know where it's documented by any chance?

ognyankulev• 2 years ago

It's there, in Shared bindings: "Alt+L lists the contents of the current directory, unless the cursor is over a directory argument, in which case the contents of that directory will be listed."

000ooo0002• 2 years ago

Bash users: FYI you can bind shortcuts like this, too. I have my right hand home row keys bound to __bash_ctrl_n() (for e.g.), and various tools in my dotfiles override these functions (git, if installed, sets up __bash_ctrl_e() to run git status and git log).

jmholla2• 2 years ago

Neat. Can you share the source of any of the functions you've bound to some of your keys?

hggh• 2 years ago

And also results in a cleaner shell history

In Bash you can also keep the history cleaner by adding ls (or other commands) to the HISTIGNORE env var: https://superuser.com/questions/232885/can-you-share-wisdom-...

nolist_policy• 2 years ago

I just use bash and tab tab all the time.

FergusArgyll• 2 years ago

Yes! one full hand of mine is kept in reserve to keep hitting tab

networked• 2 years ago

Nice tip. What got rid of most of my use of `ls` in fish was running `ls` automatically when you changed directories:

  function ls_on_cd --on-variable PWD
      ls
  end

blooalien• 2 years ago

Ooo! Thank you! That is a nice tip! Stealing it right now. :)

macintux• 2 years ago

Seems like that would strongly encourage me to keep my directories tidier.

ktm5j• 2 years ago

Oh cool idea! But gosh I think I would hate that.. I typically know what files are in directories that I'm working in, and usually care more about the output of previous commands I've run. I feel like this would teach me to never change directories

diggan• 2 years ago

Neat idea, thanks! So obvious in hindsight... Just need to add some logic to it so it doesn't output more than N files.

For others (like me) who use zsh:

    function chpwd() {
      ls
    }

tutipop• 2 years ago

I do the same in bash, but it's a bit wordier:

  _chpwd_hook() {
    if [[ "$PWD" != "$PREVPWD" ]]; then
      ls
      PREVPWD="$PWD"
    fi
  }

  PROMPT_COMMAND=(_chpwd_hook)

Goes well with

  shopt -s autocd
  alias r='cd -'

fastasucan• 2 years ago

A word of a warning if you have folders with _a lot_ of files.

oneshtein• 2 years ago

I just use mc and ctrl-O, to switch between shell and listing.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

For me, there are two principal cases of sorting in `ls` output: alphabetical when I'm trying to find something I don't know/ remember exactly, and mtime-based when I want to see the latest (or oldest) in a group of related files. I don't see how it could work with one shortcut.

Another thing is `ls -l` that's important when I need to understand file sizes and especially how symlinks are set up. Yet another is `ls -ld` which explains details about directories.

All these cases could be made more ergonomic, and maybe partly merged. But I don't see how I could compress them into one type of output that fits all purposes.

(My current fancy version of `ls` is `lsd`, but I still use the built-in `ls` a lot.)

whartung• 2 years ago

To this end I made a simple script, `latest`, which is, essentially, `ls -lt $@ | head`.

So, `latest *.log`, etc.

Other than that, simple autocomplete does a lot of my ls work for me.

Macha• 2 years ago

This appears to run eza for me, probably because I've aliased ls to eza. So I'm guessing it's just running `ls`.

samatman3• 2 years ago

TIL! great tip, thanks. Now I just need to wire that shortcut up to `lsd` instead of `ls`.

Update: the ls command is stored at __fish_ls_command, so this is a `set -g __fish_ls_command lsd` in `config.fish`.

latchkey• 2 years ago

history? atuin has been great.

sva_2• 2 years ago

In bash/zsh you can easily setup fzf completions ctrl-r (for directory) and ctrl-t (for shell history)

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

I realized most of my ls runs come right after `cd`, so I added these to my startup files. Now almost every `cd` does `ls` automatically:

    # bash, simple
    function cd() {
        builtin cd "$@" && ls -l
    }

    # fish, a bit more sophisticated
    function cd

        builtin cd $argv;
        if test $status -gt 0  # there was an error, stop
            return
        end

        # auto print dir info
        if test "$argv" != ""  # not home though
            dir  # aka ls -l ...
        end
    end

Osiris• 2 years ago

I have been using fish for a long time and I didn't know about this. Thanks.

_flux2• 2 years ago

Seems quite similar to https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd . How do they compare?

I know though lsd has one annoying bug when using it for grepping: https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd/issues/1052

cafkafk4• 2 years ago

https://github.com/orgs/eza-community/discussions/679#discus...

_flux2• 2 years ago

Well, eza certainly seems faster on my micro-benchmark as well, though in general I never have any performance issues with these tools. Btw, ls beats them both easily (in my single-directory test).

So features would be my main criteria, I guess. At least eza doesn't have that annoying bug I linked :).

Short comparison: - Eza doesn't have the lsd's piping bug - Eza has more different output from ls than I would like (by default) - Both have git support - Eza --hyperlink doesn't have "auto" mode so if I alias ls to it, ls | sed hacks will likely behave unexpectedly if I enable it: https://github.com/eza-community/eza/issues/703 and this also seems like an instance of it: https://github.com/eza-community/eza/issues/693 - Eza is slower to write than lsd :) - Eza has more options to change its behaviour than lsd

Overall I think the hyperlink issue is more severe than lsd's piping one, so I think I'll just keep using lsd for the time being.

srid• 2 years ago

I've used both, but settled on using `lsd`. While eza has slightly better performance, that difference doesn't usually matter for a `ls` alternative (unless you operate on very large directories) and `lsd` is nicer and feature rich.

felixr• 2 years ago

I find it strange that the README does not mention at that `eza` is a fork of `exa`.

cafkafk4• 2 years ago

contributions welcome

soraminazuki• 2 years ago

Crediting people becomes awkward when it's done by outsiders though.

n8henrie• 2 years ago

eza features not in exa (non-exhaustive):

It at least mentions it's existence (though no link or context)

sriram_malhar• 2 years ago

For a long time now, I have wanted all command line utilities to consider options --exclude <regex> and --include <regex> options, where the regex refers to paths. This is applied before they do any displaying or evaluation.

So much more convenient than xargs.

jiehong4• 2 years ago

À la powershell’s Get-ChildItems!

It’s a good point, as the shell glob syntax is too limited.

arp242• 2 years ago

You can get something similar with shell globs, and ~not in zsh. e.g. *~*.c(.) to exclude all .c files (and only list files, not directories or anything else).

Looks a bit obscure at a glance due to lack of spaces, but it's not that different from -exclude or "| grep -v".

Tor3• 2 years ago

I have a problem with all terminal tools that insist on using colors to distinguish between various file types or attributes etc ('ls' is often set up like that too for distros, but I simply delete the config which sets that, the default doesn't). I use a terminal background which is easy on my eyes, and those color schemes always include colors which clash with the background or makes them hard to see in other ways. In short - I don't want colors in my 'ls' or 'ls' equivalent output. I'm fine with what ls with '-AFC' gives me.

jiehong4• 2 years ago

--color=never

scns• 2 years ago

Solarized is easy on the eyes and the colours are chosen for readability.

https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/

The list on the site lacks some entries. Konsole has it built in and i bet Gnome Terminal too.

kibwen• 2 years ago

Pet peeve, Solarized makes no sense as a terminal color scheme, because it maps brgreen, brblue, bryellow, and brcyan to barely-distinguishable shades of gray. It just doesn't have enough colors in its palette to cover the range of colors that the authors of CLI tools expect your terminal to be able to display.

Also, Solarized's whole trick is that its colors are perceptually uniform in terms of lightness, and I think the results speak for themselves why we don't do this in practice. If you want a yellow that actually looks yellow and not a shade of puke brown, it needs to be brighter than the other colors (especially red, which needs to be darker than the other colors if you don't want it to look pink).

Narishma• 2 years ago

It's not easy on my eyes. It looks washed out with too low contrast.

eddyg• 2 years ago

If tooling would simply use the Base16 Framework[0] instead of arbitrary colors from “256 color” or “RGB” color modes, this would be much less of a problem: the output would always be displayed with (presumably) readable colors defined by your terminal.

[0] https://github.com/chriskempson/base16

[1] https://tinted-theming.github.io/base16-gallery/

brabel• 2 years ago

As a CLI tool author, I don't understand how I can use base16 to "theme" my tool's output. Can you point to some resources?

MatthiasPortzel• 2 years ago

the output would always be displayed with (presumably) readable colors

There are several obstacles that make this not the case in practice, unfortunately. Black on white and white on black (whatever hex colors those actually are) will look fine. But different applications will use the accent colors differently. For example, some might use black text on a colored background, and others may use colored text on a black background. Some tools even use “bright” colored text on a different colored background. This is masked in most cases by iTerm2’s “Minimum contrast” setting, but when I tried to design a color palette with good contrast with that setting off, I found it to be very difficult.

oneeyedpigeon2• 2 years ago

30-odd years of using ls and this comment is finally the catalyst for me to start using -A instead of -a. Thank you!

bartekpacia• 2 years ago

https://no-color.org

ducktective2• 2 years ago

You can use vivid [1], choose a proper theme that works for your terminal background and load the generated LS_COLORS variable into your shell.

[1] https://github.com/sharkdp/vivid/

samatman3• 2 years ago

I'm totally the other way around, I rely on colorized output heavily.

But! There's supposed to be a solution to this, set $NO_COLOR to some value. https://no-color.org

Totally reasonable to file a bug report against tools which don't check and respect that env variable.

Tyriar• 2 years ago

I work on VS Code. We have a feature for this exact problem that enforces a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 via shifting the luminance of the foreground text by default https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_mini... . This feature's in xterm.js so any terminal based on xterm.js can leverage this.

We actually got a bit of push back when this was released but I haven't heard anything for quite a while now that some time has passed and we have a FAQ for colors not being "correct".

deskr• 2 years ago

Visually fancy, but personally it's way too "busy" for my brain.

dsjkvf• 2 years ago

What's the point, though?

You still have to rely on POSIX and / or GNU tools in most scenarios, and if already knowing / using those, then why bother to switch to anything else?

jryb• 2 years ago

I don't know how common my situation is, but I don't have any of those constraints. I have eza aliased to ls both on my daily driver and all of my work servers and it hasn't caused me a single problem.

oneeyedpigeon2• 2 years ago

Use cases are different. I bet I'm not the only one who runs ls manually on my command line a LOT more than I ever use it in scripts.

jen203• 2 years ago

The only time you have to care about GNU tools vs your own preference of tool is when writing scripts to run on computers running some Linux distributions, and per [1] you shouldn’t be using ls for that.

[1] https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2045

alerighi• 2 years ago

Yes but if you work professionally as a software engineer, chances are that you don't only use your PC. Being that a server that you connect remotely to develop on, or a production system where you connect to investigate a bug, or the PC of a coworker you are helping, or getting inside a container, etc.

Getting to know and use a standard setup makes you efficient in that situations, that is also the reason why I learned to use vim (since vim or at least vi you can take for granted there is on every system).

The only concession that I make is the shell, since zsh is much more convenient to use than bash, even if every time I use a system with bash I of course write some code that works in zsh and have to remember that in bash you can't do it. That is annoying, but to me it's worth it to use a better shell, not worth probably for an `ls` clone.

fsiefken2• 2 years ago

Neat, it also works on termux, I like the tree output. Is there a parameter to just display the size, name and date format YYMMDD or rickdate for even shorter display, or can I hack it in the rust code? The permission and user column output distract me and take up space. With rust it can also be compiled to wasm and run on ios a-shell (which runs vim and python wasm and other smallish wasm's).

e38383• 2 years ago

eza -l --time-style=+%Y%m%d --no-user --no-permissions

kseistrup• 2 years ago

Tangentially, does anyone know what happened to Ben Sago, the author of exa?

daghamm• 2 years ago

Who uses ls anyway? I tab-complete until it lists the files I need.

Just kidding. But on a more serious note, why does he claim ls is not maintained anymore?

hparadiz• 2 years ago

For some reason it became the norm to think that if some piece of software isn't updated regularly that it's inherently out of date.

linkdd2• 2 years ago

For statically built executables, this might just be true.

Since when you give up shared libraries, you give up on security upgrades without needing to rebuild the world.

coffeeri2• 2 years ago

I think they are not referring to ls, but to exa [0], which is not maintained anymore.

[0]https://github.com/ogham/exa

Izkata• 2 years ago

No, they definitely mean "ls":

By deliberately making some decisions differently, eza attempts to be a more featureful, more user-friendly version of ls.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

Of course `ls` is maintained, as a part of your shell or of coreutils.

But `eza` is a variation of `exa`, and the latter is no longer maintained, AFAICT.

ducktective2• 2 years ago

Professional Linux masters just use the `echo *` shell built-in

kazinator5• 2 years ago

Because he's deliberately confusing "maintained" with "actively developed" in order to insinuate that the existing tools is unmaintained.

linkdd2• 2 years ago

The "maintained" refers to `exa`, which is also written in Rust.

Rust binaries are static, which means they need to be rebuilt when security fixes are published on one of their dependencies.

Without active development to at least update, the static binary becomes a liability.

On another note, the developers on exa did explicitly say the project was unmaintained:

https://github.com/ogham/exa/commit/fb05c421ae98e076989eb6e8...

kristopolous• 2 years ago

For people reading this and trying it for the first time and going through nix problems (well I did at least), check your distro package repo instead for eza. You probably already have it.

tcsenpai• 2 years ago

I am gonna pioneering using this as a drop in replacement for "ls". If i am not back in some days, remember me as a pioneer.

Btw good work, i always like modern gnu compatible tools

JonChesterfield• 2 years ago

I'm under the impression that ls doesn't do very much. I'd expect it to be a small wrapper around libc.

This is thousands of lines of rust with emphasis on community building and ongoing development.

There seems to be a disconnect between engineering effort and product here which doesn't totally make sense to me. I think I'll stay with ls.

hibbelig• 2 years ago

Challenge: which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls?

I would guess that ls has at least 50 different behaviors based on the switches.

st_goliath• 2 years ago

which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls?

For GNU ls: e/E, j/J, V, K, M, O, P, W, y/Y and z are not used

It uses all the other upper and lower case letters, along with digit 1 and has a hand full of long options without a corresponding short one.

Edit: I double-checked the man page, I'm surprised how many are unused, I would have guessed that it uses all of them by now.

creshal7• 2 years ago

eza's scope is much larger than ls's, and has tons of additional features.

And IMO, that's sensible: ls is primarily an interactive tool (basically all uses of it in shell scripts are wrong), so adding more features that help users to better/more easily make sense of their directory listings is a net benefit, even if it makes the tool somewhat slower.

Folder icons in the terminal may sound silly, but eza uses them to indicate empty folders, among others. Colour-coded file age/size columns make parsing a directory list faster. Git columns saved my many trips through gitignore / git status. And so on.

And even through not particularly fast fuse-over-network connections it's still faster than I can type, which is more than good enough for an interactive CLI tool.

WesolyKubeczek• 2 years ago

emphasis on community building

Probably the first time ever I hear about a community built on a freaking directory listing tool.

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

Definitely the first time I've heard ambition, features & especially community used as a slight.

Generally I think of most engineers I know in person as people receptive to improvements & gains. Yes they looks at costs/tradeoffs. But there feels like some strong rejectionistic / contrarianism / negativity that I wasn't expecting, that seems bizarre & antisocial to me, especially here as the top post.

zokier2• 2 years ago

ls is the archetypical example of unix gone wrong, and I think this was already widely discussed (and joked) about in early 90s (iirc unix haters had something about that). It should be just simple wrapper for readdir, but it grew into sprawling mess when it learned to stat the files too, which snowballed ls to have gazillion ways to handle all sorts of metadata

tmountain• 2 years ago

Typing eza is a pretty horrible three character combination on a qwerty keyboard. One advantage of ls is it’s a lightning fast set of key strokes. I guess you can alias, but that’s kind of weird (compatibility, etc).

acupofnope• 2 years ago

Can you elaborate on why aliasing is kind of weird?

jen203• 2 years ago

I’ve had eza (and formally exa) aliased as ls, ll and lll since around 2015 and never hit a compatibility issue.

I also have sl installed to encourage accuracy when running it…

qorrect• 2 years ago

What is 'sl' ?

cafkafk4• 2 years ago

I was a former exa user, and the z is next to x on my keyboard, wasn't a huge hassle for me

F3nd0• 2 years ago

As a Dvorak user, ‘eza’ seems like an improvement! (‘ls’ on a Dvorak layout is ‘p-’ on QWERTY; both keys on the right little finger.)

FuckButtons• 2 years ago

You can alias it to whatever you want though.

DSMan195276• 2 years ago

You can, but that's a pain to set up and maintain everywhere. I avoid using aliases for that reason, it just makes me annoyed when I ssh into a machine and it's not there.

I'm not sure the meaning behind the name, but maybe they should have picked `eya` instead, that's nice and satisfying rather than the double pinky move :D

glandium• 2 years ago

This is where an azerty keyboard shines.

elendee• 2 years ago

this was my first reaction too

redxtech• 2 years ago

`command -v eza >/dev/null && alias ls="eza"`

synergy20• 2 years ago

    ls -lrt
    eza -lrt (broken)

I wish it's 100% compatible to ls

AndyKluger• 2 years ago

Yeah that one's annoying.

I got used to a "recent" alias (Zsh):

  if (( $+commands[eza] )) {
    alias recent="eza --binary --octal-permissions --no-permissions --git -snew --icons=always"
  } else {
    alias recent="ls -rt"
  }

WhyNotHugo• 2 years ago

I keep `ls` un-aliased precisely because of this. I do keep these two aliases around:

    alias l="eza --all"
    alias ll="eza --long --all --time-style=long-iso --group"

dflock• 2 years ago

This also works on Windows, fwiw.

kazinator5• 2 years ago

GNU ls is maintained. I see commits affecting the ls.c file from 2024-06-24 and 2024-06-27; less than a month ago.

The GNU Coreutils mailing list is fairly busy also.

This project seems to be using the word maintained for the meaning of actively developed.

elashri3• 2 years ago

No the maintained here means it is a maintained (replacment) with reference that it is a fork of exa which was a ls replacment that is not maintained anymore. It does not say that ls is not maintained.

ehutch792• 2 years ago

Look at the title above. It only says Eza and ls. It says eza is maintained, which tells me the other,ls, is not maintained.

Doesn’t mention exa.

Yes it’s missing nuance if you don’t click through, but that’s a complete statement, and I wouldn’t expect people to click through to get more context

dvektor• 2 years ago

This is referencing 'exa', of which eza is a fork. Exa was unmaintained for about a year before it was marked officially deprecated by the only person with write permissions on the repository.

It has definitely been long enough now since the forking, where not everyone is aware of exa, and this language/intent is now far less clear. I see you are not the only one to comment on this, so I think it's time to update the phrasing.

godshatter2• 2 years ago

One pet peeve of mine is "human readable dates", especially for a directory listing. If I'm scanning for something I copied into a folder yesterday amongst other things, I don't want everything to show "1 day ago" if I'm looking for something I did around 11am. I want the dates and times. That goes for forums like HN. Show me the date/time and also "7 hours ago" or whatever if you have to.

I've never understood taking that information away. I wonder if it's a consequence of infinite scroll or something.

hhh• 2 years ago

You can hover over the time on HN and get a timestamp.

tirpen• 2 years ago

Not if you are on a phone or similar device, which lots of people are. Important info like that should never be only accessible by hovering a mouse pointer that may or may not exist.

dlivingston• 2 years ago

I agree. GitHub does this too on commits. "foo.cpp modified last year." It makes no sense, at least without the ability to view additional datetime information.

TheBengaluruGuy• 2 years ago

Often I want to see exact what time I made a commit to correlate it with some error code and it’s only giving it by day. Such a bummern

fngjdflmdflg5• 2 years ago

You can hover over the date for an exact timestamp. Maybe someone can write a userscript to replace the relative dates to exact ones.

mserdarsanli• 2 years ago

So annoying, I wrote this extension some time ago to get rid of relative dates in github

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yyyy-mm-dd-gi...

bangaladore• 2 years ago

Particularly when many systems I've seen group the past three years into last year.

It feels like the categories are:

"Today, Yesterday, This Week, This Month, Last Year, Big Bang"

fuzztester5• 2 years ago

Yes. If we are in the middle of the current year, modified last year could mean anything from half a year ago to one and a half years ago.

quirino• 2 years ago

I wonder if sites could use the HTML <time> tag for this. They could choose the human readable format but still give us the time so that it could be replaced or overlayed with some extension.

I always try to use it when writing HTML.

(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...)

tjoff• 2 years ago

Yeah that is such an amazing anti-feature. And how do you deal with changes? Like, when does 1 day ago become 2 days ago? According to google it becomes two days ago after 48 hours. That means if you look at your phone after 47 hours it will say 1 day ago and you'll be tricked into it happening yesterday. Human readable my ass.

Or, you know the specific day because it was the day after your friends birthday or whatever. And you try to find a specific item, but you have to sift through an entire months of shit because all the information you get is "three months ago".

pas• 2 years ago

The intent make sense (humans are better at durations than with absolute timestamps), but the lack of granularity is ridiculous. It should be "1d 20h ago" or based on the dates in question maybe more or less granual. (It's a hard UX problem, but that just means that the program ought to know what the user wants. What's important to them. Are the searching for something? What patterns to highlight? Ie. if there's a directory with a 1000 files but only 2 old ones maybe put some emphasis on them, etc.)

xp842• 2 years ago

I utterly hate this on iOS. Suddenly after an hour or something, you irretrievably lose the time on a notification. There’s not even some fiddly power user way to force it to show you.

wocram• 2 years ago

This is a setting, you can change it to any other date format you want.

SAI_Peregrinus• 2 years ago

Yep, `--time-style`.

keybored• 2 years ago

One thing I really like about all of the ago formats:

- What it says: 1 year ago

- What it is: 1 year and 10 months ago

fuzztester5• 2 years ago

Yes, I hate that approach too. I think it started with either Web 2.0 startups (I was working with one at the time, that implemented that in their product), or with Google and suchlike companies around that time, in their general web apps or social media web apps.

I agree, they should provide the detailed time, then provide the days ago thing too, if they want to.

crabsand• 2 years ago

The same I feel, so I didn't bother to print human readable dates in my open source mlops project. xvc file list[0] prints times in the same format even if it changed a minute or a year ago.

[0] https://docs.xvc.dev/ref/xvc-file-list

desireco42• 2 years ago

I will join others here to point out that information in readme is not presented the best way.

I am developer so I understand this, if you just take feedback from this post here and apply it, it will be much better.

- It is not fair to say ls is not maintained

- Clarify this is for of exa, I am familiar with exa, I wasn't sure what eza was.

- Give example how it can be used, alias ls="exa " for example, give few example of usage, not everyone is following your repo every day.

Thank you for work you've put into this.

xigoi2• 2 years ago

It’s not saying that ls is not maintained.

arminiusreturns• 2 years ago

MIT - immediate nope from me for my gnu/linux stacks, but it seems well made and I wish you well!

jm4• 2 years ago

What’s with all these new versions of GNU utilities being built with the MIT license? Seems like there are a lot of them.

Arnavion• 2 years ago

Rust users tend to permissively-license their code in general. I don't know if there are easily available statistics but almost everything on the Rust package repository (crates.io) is MIT or Apache-2.0; certainly the most popular libraries are.

fngjdflmdflg5• 2 years ago

Related: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils "Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils"

mprovost• 2 years ago

The GNU project didn't invent ls. The GNU coreutils (including ls) were originally new versions of either proprietary (AT&T) or BSD licensed utilities.

gkfasdfasdf3• 2 years ago

IMO the killer feature of eza/exa is not the pretty colors but the git integration - being able to see the git status of individual files in a listing (ignored, modified, etc) is pretty handy.

ttyprintk2• 2 years ago

Totally —- any idea why eza claims exa doesn’t support it? I know that’s wrong.

gkfasdfasdf3• 2 years ago

I don't know, I do recall exa was a little finicky about linking with libgit2 - maybe some distros didn't come with it linked by default.

anthk• 2 years ago

Hints on bare ls, either GNU or BSD: - the -F flag give hints on items. Man ls. - never parse ls's output - color isn't always needed, see -F

sandreas3• 2 years ago

There is also 'lsd' but I still prefer eza.

For everyone interested there is a lot of modern command line tools I nowadays prefer over the old stuff:

  bat - cat with highlight
  difftastic - better diff
  gdu - ncdu for ssds (disk space analyser)
  zoxide - modern cd
  fd - find alternative
  rg - ripgrep (grep)
  fzf - fuzzy finder
  jless - json viewer with mouse folding
  dra - download and install release assets
  lazygit - git TUI
  lazydocker - docker TUI
  yazi - file manager with image preview
  zellij - better tmux / screen
  starship - cross shell prompt config

Have fun

sandywaffles2• 2 years ago

I use du-dust over gdu, but otherwise my list is almost identical to yours.

sandreas3• 2 years ago

Thanks. I will definitely try that out.

thiht3• 2 years ago

4 additional tools I use regularly:

- task, a Makefile alternative

- hyperfine, a benchmark tool

- vegeta, a load testing tool

- sd, a better, more intuitive sed

There’s also the JSON trinity:

- jq, the well know JSON processor

- jc, convert the output of many CLI tools to JSON

- gron, make JSON greppable

sandreas3• 2 years ago

Cool. Some new ones there. I usually use a script with dra to download my release assets to `$HOME/bin`

I also use `oha` (Load Testing), `btop` (better top), `rmlint` (find duplicates) and `cheat` (similar to tldr - short manpages).

There is a blog post / video that shows how to integrate fzf with git, bat etc... it's one of the best videos I've ever seen on terminal productivity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmqDYw9C30I

This guy is bonkers - take a look at his other videos, too

rwmj• 2 years ago

hyperfine is absolutely brilliant. My go-to replacement for time.

kstrauser• 2 years ago

Those are all very nice! I've come to be a huge fan of just as a Makefile replacement for the common case where I'm not actually computing vast build dependencies.

theshrike79• 2 years ago

Task is _amazing_

I tried magefiles[0] for a while, but Task just works so much better and isn't Go-specific as heavily.

[0] https://github.com/magefile/mage

sandywaffles2• 2 years ago

This link also has a large list of additional tools I hadn't heard of but look interesting.

https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

brimwats• 2 years ago

this one is maintained

https://github.com/johnalanwoods/maintained-modern-unix

gkfasdfasdf3• 2 years ago

Great list! I would also add:

   viddy, a replacement for watch that includes history

magarnicle2• 2 years ago

I didn't find zellij to be better than screen. The tabs/screens are not numbered correctly so switching directly to them requires manually counting. A non-starter for me.

lilyball• 2 years ago

If you don't like the default tab bar, you can use the zjstatus plugin (https://github.com/dj95/zjstatus) to replace it with a customizable one that can show the tab index.

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

As someone who defaults to lsd, is there any reason why you prefer eza to it?

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

Gotta love Rust (in which most if not all of these tools are written).

godelski• 2 years ago

  >   fd - find alternative
  >   rg - ripgrep (grep)

NOTE OF WARNING:

BY DEFAULT these ignores anything included in your `.gitignore` folder. So if you think it is a straight find replacement, you'll likely be surprised. fd discussion here[0]

Just make sure that when recommending people these tools that this is clear because if they don't read the docs (lol who does) they'll miss this part.

This is a pet peeve of mine. I wish the people that make these replacement coreutils (and others) would leave the defaults as very similar to the original tool. I do really like the new functionalities but if you market it as "an alternative" ("It is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find") then they should respect the defaults of the original because it reduces new user surprise. I mean aliases exist... So it is better to have in your ~/.${SHELL##*/}rc file to have `alias fd='fd --ignore'` than `alias fd='fd --no-ignore'`.

Side note/pro tip: use `\command` if you want to use an unaliased version. An example of this is that I have `alias grep='grep --color=always --no-messages --binary-files=without-match` but this can sometimes be problematic because the color option can change the character representation so if you pipe this into `curl` you will get errors. This is not the case in all piping, but it is a shocking and confusing experience when you first encounter it. You can validate this by `echo "Hello world" | \grep --color=always "Hello" | hexdump` and then `!!:s^always^never`

[0] https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/issues/612

burntsushi• 2 years ago

I wish the people that make these replacement coreutils (and others) would leave the defaults as very similar to the original tool. I do really like the new functionalities but if you market it as "an alternative" ("It is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find") then they should respect the defaults of the original because it reduces new user surprise. I mean aliases exist... So it is better to have in your ~/.${SHELL##*/}rc file to have `alias fd='fd --ignore'` than `alias fd='fd --no-ignore'`.

I never marketed ripgrep explicitly as an "alternative." But it would be entirely appropriate to do so. An "alternative" does not mean "has exactly the same behavior." You're confusing that with, "drop-in replacement that is bug-for-bug compatible."

If people such as myself working on these new tools had your mindset, then there would literally never be any room for improving the default behavior. Which just seems like a wild position to stake out to me. Defaults really matter, and other than performance, ripgrep's default ignore behavior is far and away the thing people consistently remark as their favorite feature.

quasarj• 2 years ago

What happened to Exa?

phlip9• 2 years ago

Can definitely recommend eza (prev. exa). I've used it as an ls replacement for a long time with zero problems. If anyone's using nix home-manager, here's my config for inspiration:

    programs.eza = {
      enable = true;

      # In list view, include a column with each file's git status.
      git = true;
    };

    programs.bash.shellAliases = {
      ks = "eza";
      sl = "eza";
      l = "eza";
      ls = "eza";
      ll = "eza -l";
      la = "eza -a";
      lt = "eza --tree";
      lla = "eza -la";
    };

INTPenis• 2 years ago

I use lsd, because I like the name and it does what I want so far.

barkingcat• 2 years ago

How are people paging with these ls replacements? I wish with all the features it includes some guidance about which pager is suitable. more? less? something else? how does the pretty colors work with paging?

timmytokyo• 2 years ago

I use the --color=always option with eza. This allows it to be piped through less and still maintain the color.

To avoid having to type that option every time, I have a bash alias for ls:

  alias ls='eza -F --color=always'

codr7• 2 years ago

I actually installed it a few days ago, which is rare for me, I tend to be restrictive to a fault with configuring my environment these days.

Happy so far.

Difftastic was another gem for me.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

It looks like the nu-ansi-term crate hardcodes escape sequences. It would be more reliable to use terminfo or termcap as the sources of truth for which ones the tty supports.

AlchemistCamp• 2 years ago

Not at three key strokes, it isn't!

gaws• 2 years ago

`alias ls = "exa"`

Problem solved.

betaby• 2 years ago

Why `ls` replacement needs kerberos and ssh?

  ldd /usr/bin/eza
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f5238f5e000)
        libgit2.so.1.7 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgit2.so.1.7 (0x00007f5238cfd000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f5238cd0000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f5238bee000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f5238a09000)
        libgssapi_krb5.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgssapi_krb5.so.2 (0x00007f52389b5000)
        libmbedtls.so.14 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmbedtls.so.14 (0x00007f523897f000)
        libmbedx509.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmbedx509.so.1 (0x00007f523895e000)
        libmbedcrypto.so.7 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmbedcrypto.so.7 (0x00007f52388d3000)
        libhttp_parser.so.2.9 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhttp_parser.so.2.9 (0x00007f52388c8000)
        libpcre2-8.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-8.so.0 (0x00007f523882d000)
        libssh2.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssh2.so.1 (0x00007f52387e6000)
        libz.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007f52387c5000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f5238f60000)
        libkrb5.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libkrb5.so.3 (0x00007f52386ef000)
        libk5crypto.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libk5crypto.so.3 (0x00007f52386c2000)
        libcom_err.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcom_err.so.2 (0x00007f52386bc000)
        libkrb5support.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libkrb5support.so.0 (0x00007f52386af000)
        libcrypto.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.3 (0x00007f5238000000)
        libkeyutils.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libkeyutils.so.1 (0x00007f52386a6000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv.so.2 (0x00007f5238695000)
        libzstd.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libzstd.so.1 (0x00007f52385cd000)

atiedebee• 2 years ago

That's a lot of dependencies for ls of all things

ptdorf• 2 years ago

Eza: A modern, maintained replacement for Exa ;-)

Eza: A modern, maintained replacement for ls

Related Stories