Is exa the better ls?

Make browsing your files more fun.

Everyone uses ls every day. It takes place six in my top ten used commands (calculated over the last 6803 commands):

   2000 git
    589 mvn
    427 gcloud
    392 ./ci/deploy
    298 cd
    237 ls
    223 docker
    193 sudo
    140 curl
    113 terraform

A command used so often should be a pleasure to use. But the output of ls is rather dull.

Displaying the content of a folder with ls -alh looks like this:

You get a lot of information, but it is hard to grasp:

1. if it’s a file or a directory

2. the access rights

3. the user and group (blurred out)

4. file size

5. modify date

6. file name

You can distinguish files and folders easily, but the rest is just white text. We could use some colors, and maybe icons?

If you liked this post, you can buy me a coffee :-)

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A better solution.

exa gives you just that. The website says it’s a ‘modern replacement for ls’, and it surely is.

A modern replacement for ls.

You list files hundreds of times a day. Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?

You can install exa with your package manager:

sudo apt-get install exa

Look at the same folder with exa.

Output with exa

You immediately spot some differences:

1. access rights are color coded

2. every column has its own color

3. icons show what kinds of files you have

4. special files (README.md) are highlighted

Already better. But there is more. You do not know what is inside the folders using ls. With exa --tree --level 2 you can see the content of each folder:

There is much more to exa. Check out all options at its website.

My favorite parameters are:

1. -l which gives you the list view

2. --icons to get the icons

3. --no-user to hide information about the owner

4. --group-directories-first to show the directories first

5. --time-style long-iso to change the date format.

I added an alias to my .zshrc (.bashrc if you use bash) which overrides ll:

alias ll='exa -l --icons --no-user --group-directories-first  --time-style long-iso'

Using this, you get:

My exa configuration

This enables me to grasp folder content much faster. I hope you can take advantage of this too.

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Sources and links

• documentation for exa

• I use Gnome Terminal with the Dracula Theme

• my shell is zsh with oh-my-zsh