<story><title>Exa, a modern replacement for ls</title><url>https://the.exa.website/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_jal</author><text>It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos.&lt;p&gt;That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of &amp;#x27;grid&amp;#x27; display entirely - reading across just doesn&amp;#x27;t work for me. Etc.&lt;p&gt;More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I do it so much during the average day that I don&amp;#x27;t even think about it. Can&amp;#x27;t say I immediately know every one of the switches, but probably 10 or so variants I use daily are pure muscle memory, and less frequently used things (extended attributes, symlink-deref options, etc.) I can remember without the man page.&lt;p&gt;So in that sense, `ls` is well into the same category as vi for me - I&amp;#x27;m so accustomed to whatever warts there may be that switching would be much more painful than any efficiency gain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cytzol</author><text>Thanks for the kudos! It&amp;#x27;s absolutely mindboggling how many times I&amp;#x27;ve decided to deviate from one of ls&amp;#x27;s default settings -- certain that the old way was inferior and outdated, and that the new way will be obvious and immensely popular -- only to find people have no idea why I&amp;#x27;m doing things this way! I need the colours to help me scan the output; if I don&amp;#x27;t see human-readable units, I curse myself for forgetting the flag. But thousands of people don&amp;#x27;t like this, and it&amp;#x27;s usually a different set of features with each person, too. I would never have guessed I was so &amp;#x27;out there&amp;#x27;!&lt;p&gt;ls is one of the most entrenched pieces of software there is; this is freeing, in a way, because it provides a stable base for people to rely on, leaving exa free to experiment. Everyone who values stability and simplicity most of all won&amp;#x27;t be switching from ls any time soon, which means I can push exa more in the direction I want it to go.&lt;p&gt;(Fun facts: very early releases of exa didn&amp;#x27;t have a grid mode at all, just the long mode, because that was the only one I used. So there have been &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; concessions to popularity :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Exa, a modern replacement for ls</title><url>https://the.exa.website/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_jal</author><text>It is great to scratch an itch and make something behave exactly as you want it to be - kudos.&lt;p&gt;That said, this is very much not for me. Default-colorized is something I emphatically do not want; defaulting to relative units, ditto. It it were me, the first thing I would do is get rid of &amp;#x27;grid&amp;#x27; display entirely - reading across just doesn&amp;#x27;t work for me. Etc.&lt;p&gt;More prosaically, `ls` is sort of like breathing for me - I do it so much during the average day that I don&amp;#x27;t even think about it. Can&amp;#x27;t say I immediately know every one of the switches, but probably 10 or so variants I use daily are pure muscle memory, and less frequently used things (extended attributes, symlink-deref options, etc.) I can remember without the man page.&lt;p&gt;So in that sense, `ls` is well into the same category as vi for me - I&amp;#x27;m so accustomed to whatever warts there may be that switching would be much more painful than any efficiency gain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moxious</author><text>That muscle memory must have taken quite some time to develop.  Here&amp;#x27;s to a future where the legions of programmers coming down the pike don&amp;#x27;t have to spend that investment to get the same or better result.</text></comment>