
Exa – a modern replacement for ls - gozzoo
https://the.exa.website/
======
taylodl
Here are the advantages of _ls_

1\. It's already on my system. No installation necessary.

2\. It's on EVERYBODY's system. No matter what Unix-based terminal I go up to,
I know it has _ls_.

3\. I know how _ls_ works. I can focus my time on solving business problems
rather than learning a variation of a tool I've been using for 30 years.

~~~
wahern
ls is also defined by POSIX, including the format of output so you can
reliably parse out metadata. IIRC there's no other well-defined way to query,
e.g., the size of a file. The stat(1) command is non-portable, not always
available, and the GNU and BSD versions don't even pretend to behave similarly
in terms of the option flags or format specifiers.

I'd have more interest in these new utilities if they actually paid some
attention to these sorts of details. It would be trivial to both implement
POSIX semantics as well as provide all the fancy behaviors you'd want as an
extension, especially because POSIX behavior is often only defined for
specific situations (i.e. if a particular flag is specified and printing to a
pipe or from a non-interactive session).

But when utilities don't bother implementing basic POSIX behavior it tells me
that they don't actually understand all the _reasons_ for particular
behaviors. You can't fix something if you don't understand what the problems
are. Simply declaring something as legacy and non-sensical doesn't cut it.

