I’ve tried a few of these, but most of them seem to be following the trend of folding other shell functionality into one tool. Searching for contents (find + grep -H, or ripgrep), filtering (grep), sorting (ls does it natively, or you can use sort, sort -h for sorting human readable sizes), the list goes on and on.
I guess this is a mini lament that many of these tools are moving away from the Unix philosophy of do one thing well, and make it easy to chain.
And a last very small lament that BeOS didn’t succeed, and their filesystem-as-a-database approach didn’t become more standard.
You can still chain ripgrep. I specifically designed it so that you can chain it just like you would a normal grep.
It does indeed also include other functionality that might traditionally be left to other tools (like filtering files). But this is nothing that GNU grep wasn't already doing itself anyway.
IMO, it's better to view the Unix philosophy as a means to an end and not an end to itself. And IMO, it's important to weigh the benefits of coupling to the user experience.
>view the Unix philosophy as a means to an end and not an end to itself
it won't be a means to an end any more if you don't preserve it, so not breaking that aspect of it has to be one of your ends. if you use it to take ls to a new place but that place is not within the ecosystem, it will be an evolutionary dead end, or worse, the first meteor in the meteor storm that ends all life.
current/traditional unix may not be the be-all/end-all, but replacing it/changing it requires viewing it comprehensively and changing all the tools at once or having a plan to. A good example of this is Plan9
I think ripgrep specifically is counted in the comment you reply to as a tool that _does_ do one thing well, and that one should use it (or grep) in combination with an ls, instead of giving ls filtering abilities.
They don't do one thing well since it's all text, not structured data, which makes chained analysis a challenge, which leads to the desire for integration
ls is tabular data, and you can format it (ls -1, ls -l, ls -w, plus sorting, field formatting, and more), and you can cut/parse/format in a standard way. Every field sans the filename is fixed length, can be handled with awk/cut/sed according your daily mood and requirements, etc. etc.
So, ls can be chained very nicely, which I do every day, even without thinking.
You don't need to have a "structured data with fields" to parse it. You just need to think it like a tabular data with line/column numbers (ls -l, etc.) or just line numbers (ls -1).
So, as long as ls does one thing well, it's alright.
Ah, some of the "enhanced" ls tools can't distinguish between pipe and a terminal, and always print color/format escape codes to pipe too, doubling the fun of using them. So, thanks, I'll stick with my standard ls. That one works.
A lot of this post hinges on the fact that newlines in filenames were legal, and that people wrote shell without handling quoting correctly. While quoting (as well as ls altering filenames) is still an issue, find -print0, read -d '', and similar are no longer neccessary. Newlines are now forbidden in filenames: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu
> A bunch of C functions are now encouraged to report EILSEQ if the last component of a pathname to a file they are to create contains a newline
This, yes, makes newlines in filenames effectively illegal on operating systems strictly conforming to the new POSIX standard. However, older systems will not be enforcing this and any operating system which exposes a syscall interface that does not require libc (such as Linux) is also not required to emit any errors. The only time even in the future that you should NOT worry about handling the newline case is on filesystems where it's is expressly forbidden, such as NTFS.
Tbh, i dont understand why people want to rewrite ls of all things.
Like don't get me wrong, if they had fun, that's great.
But all i use ls for is getting a list of files. I barely ever even use the -la options. There just doesn't seem like a lot of room for improvement in something so simple.
I think the standard ls doesn't have much in terms of color/icons, so its simplicity probably makes it a great side project for improving on.
Not a big surface area, some easy improvements. A whole lot less stressful than rewriting grep (although I'm massively grateful Burnt Sushi did such a crazy thing)
Thanks @benrutter! You nailed it - ls is like the "Hello World" of system tools. Simple enough that you won't tear your hair out, but meaty enough to learn a ton.
Started with "ooh, pretty colors!" and before I knew it I was deep in filesystem APIs and terminal wizardry. Way less scary than tackling grep.
Sometimes the best projects are the ones where you can't mess up too badly... well, unless you accidentally delete everything while testing
Thanks for all the feedback! Let me clarify a few things about lla.
The most amazing part of this project wasn't just building another ls alternative - it was the incredible learning journey. Building a systems tool in Rust while implementing a plugin architecture taught me more in a few weeks than months of reading could have.
Yes, it does more than traditional ls, and that's intentional. The plugin system came from scratching my own itch of constantly switching between different terminal tools. Each feature added was a chance to dive deeper into systems programming and Unix internals.
The performance still needs work, and the documentation could be better. But that's the beauty of open source - you ship it, learn from the feedback, and keep improving. Building in public is an incredible way to level up your skills.
For anyone considering a similar project: pick a common tool you use daily and try reimagining it. You'll be surprised how much you learn along the way.
Did anyone here use Genera on an original lisp machine? It had a pseudo-graphical interface and a directory listing provided clickable results. It would be really neat if we could use escaping to confer more information to the terminal about what a particular piece of text means.
Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!
Bonus points for defining a new term type and standard for this.
This is nice, but a poor substitute for what Genera was doing.
You see, Genera knows the actual type of everything that is clickable. When a program needs an input, objects of the wrong type _lose their interactivity_ for the duration. So if you list the files in some directory, the names of those files are indeed links that you can click on. Clicking on one would bring up a context menu of relevant actions (view, edit, print, delete, etc). If a program asks for a filename as input then clicking on a file instead supplies the file object to the program. Clicking on objects of other types does nothing.
> Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!
Doesn't your desktop (or distro) have a graphical file manager? On KDE it's Dolphin, which ex-Windows users absolutely love. I don't know what it would be on Gnome or other desktops.
That's the amazing part I'm talking about the learning experience you get from weeks of working on something like that is better than reading countless documentations
alias ls="EZA_COLORS='da=36' eza --time-style=relative --color-scale=age"
alias lsa="ls --almost-all" # ignore . ..
alias l="ls --long --classify=always" # show file indicators
alias la="l --almost-all"
# Tree view
alias ltreea="ls --tree"
alias ltree="ltreea --level=2"
# Sort by time or size
alias lt="ls --long --sort=time"
alias lta="lt --almost-all"
# lsd is faster than eza
alias lss="lsd --long --total-size --sort=size --reverse"
alias lssa="lss --almost-all"
lla seems to go beyond what ls should do for some reason. Why show git and code complexity info? Just use tools dedicated for these things, otherwise, it will be an unmaintainable mess. If you can solve a problem easily with external tools, then there's no reason to add a feature for it.
On my system it uses twice as much CPU as plain old ls in a directory with just 13k files. To recursively list a directory with 500k leaf files, lla needs > 10x as much CPU. Apparently it is both slower and with higher complexity.
Coloring files of the same file-type is my favorite feature. Is the extension used to group them or a MIME-header parser? I guess the extension, since it is faster.
Other than colorization, what are people getting out of ls replacements like this? I've recently started using ranger which might replace my ls usage for the most part since it not only shows everything in the directory but has vim like shortcuts for filtering, sorting, and searching the directory as well as previewing files and entering other directories
Categorization and hashes seem to be good ideas, yet you could do all of these with other tools already.
You could be knowing the tool 'exa', a similar ls alternative. Just wanted to mention.
I use git command line interface. Not because it is good (it isn't) or because I enjoy suffering (I think I don't), but because it is a standard on all the machines that have, you know, git.
What good is a ls alternative if I need to install it everywhere I need ls? I'd prefer using the standard ls even if it is not ideal. But maybe that's just me.
This is also one of the reasons I write C++ with vim without any auto-completion nor fancy plugins (I do use syntax highlighting though, but I think it comes by default with vim nowadays), as well as using GNU screen -- not every machines install tmux by default, surprisingly. In case I need to login into some random Linux box, I'm sure I'll be almost as productive as I am on my own machine.
I assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but I don't think the comparison works at all.
I spend maybe 1% of my working hours (being generous) using `ls` and something like 50% (likely more) using my editor.
If there is some alternative to `ls` that makes my `ls` workflows 2x faster, my productivity increases by 0.5%. If I use a sub-optimal editor that makes my workflow 2x slower, I lose 25% of my productivity.
When I need to login to a remote box, I am also very likely to need to use `ls` since I am less familiar than on my own machine, whereas I am unlikely to do any sort of heavy development work (typically I just need to edit a couple configuration files, or do some git operations).
I’ve been on machines in the last few years that didn’t have screen either. Maybe it was a minimal install or something, but I specifically remember having to install it to get some long running stuff going.
(Thinking it was Ubuntu server, but guessing someone will correct me)
Tmux vs screen is an odd one; it kinda feels like screen was included in the era when people were actually trying to make the default install on servers kind of nice to use with a functional set of assumed programs. And now, it is fairly widespread just due to legacy.
Nowadays, and possibly for the better (every line of code is a potential bug and every bug is a potential vulnerability) it seems like systems don’t want to include this sort of stuff. So, I’m sure if the decision were made today, tmux or screen, tmux would win. Unfortunately, “none” seems like the real future option…
What's the point of suffering everywhere if you don't enjoy it? It's not like using a better alternative prevents you from knowing how to use ls, but only in those cases where there is no better alternative
`lc` mentioned elsethread [1] was always extensible with plugins for formatting and file-typing (but also always supported libmagic-based file-typology). There are other fairly distinctive ideas in `lc`, actually.. the README has a list.
While I like it and it's a good idea, I think the reality is that developers capable enough to write shared library/DLL plugins are more likely to just submit PRs and make such stuff built-in but maybe optional.
There seems to be a lot of projects that is now competing to replace ls (for people preferences)
For reference, those are the ones I am familiar with. They are somehow active in contrast to things like exa which is not maintained anymore.
eza: (https://github.com/eza-community/eza)
lsd: (https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd)
colorls: (https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls)
g: (https://github.com/Equationzhao/g)
ls++: (https://github.com/trapd00r/LS_COLORS)
logo-ls: (https://github.com/canta2899/logo-ls) - this is forked because main development stopped 4 years ago.
Any more?
Personally I prefer eza and wrote a zsh plugin that is basically aliases that matches what I have from my muscle memory.
I’ve tried a few of these, but most of them seem to be following the trend of folding other shell functionality into one tool. Searching for contents (find + grep -H, or ripgrep), filtering (grep), sorting (ls does it natively, or you can use sort, sort -h for sorting human readable sizes), the list goes on and on.
I guess this is a mini lament that many of these tools are moving away from the Unix philosophy of do one thing well, and make it easy to chain.
And a last very small lament that BeOS didn’t succeed, and their filesystem-as-a-database approach didn’t become more standard.
You can still chain ripgrep. I specifically designed it so that you can chain it just like you would a normal grep.
It does indeed also include other functionality that might traditionally be left to other tools (like filtering files). But this is nothing that GNU grep wasn't already doing itself anyway.
IMO, it's better to view the Unix philosophy as a means to an end and not an end to itself. And IMO, it's important to weigh the benefits of coupling to the user experience.
>view the Unix philosophy as a means to an end and not an end to itself
it won't be a means to an end any more if you don't preserve it, so not breaking that aspect of it has to be one of your ends. if you use it to take ls to a new place but that place is not within the ecosystem, it will be an evolutionary dead end, or worse, the first meteor in the meteor storm that ends all life.
current/traditional unix may not be the be-all/end-all, but replacing it/changing it requires viewing it comprehensively and changing all the tools at once or having a plan to. A good example of this is Plan9
I think ripgrep specifically is counted in the comment you reply to as a tool that _does_ do one thing well, and that one should use it (or grep) in combination with an ls, instead of giving ls filtering abilities.
They don't do one thing well since it's all text, not structured data, which makes chained analysis a challenge, which leads to the desire for integration
ls is tabular data, and you can format it (ls -1, ls -l, ls -w, plus sorting, field formatting, and more), and you can cut/parse/format in a standard way. Every field sans the filename is fixed length, can be handled with awk/cut/sed according your daily mood and requirements, etc. etc.
So, ls can be chained very nicely, which I do every day, even without thinking.
You don't need to have a "structured data with fields" to parse it. You just need to think it like a tabular data with line/column numbers (ls -l, etc.) or just line numbers (ls -1).
So, as long as ls does one thing well, it's alright.
Ah, some of the "enhanced" ls tools can't distinguish between pipe and a terminal, and always print color/format escape codes to pipe too, doubling the fun of using them. So, thanks, I'll stick with my standard ls. That one works.
If you like that philosophy check out nushell. They go pretty hard core on that and they can because of structured output
vanilla ls has never been particularly chainable - https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
A lot of this post hinges on the fact that newlines in filenames were legal, and that people wrote shell without handling quoting correctly. While quoting (as well as ls altering filenames) is still an issue, find -print0, read -d '', and similar are no longer neccessary. Newlines are now forbidden in filenames: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu
> Newlines are now forbidden in filenames
No. To quote that article
> A bunch of C functions are now encouraged to report EILSEQ if the last component of a pathname to a file they are to create contains a newline
This, yes, makes newlines in filenames effectively illegal on operating systems strictly conforming to the new POSIX standard. However, older systems will not be enforcing this and any operating system which exposes a syscall interface that does not require libc (such as Linux) is also not required to emit any errors. The only time even in the future that you should NOT worry about handling the newline case is on filesystems where it's is expressly forbidden, such as NTFS.
Linux isn't POSIX compliant, and as far as I know has no plans to ban newlines in filenames, or even add an option to disable newlines.
I agree with this.
If they want something that is easy to use in a non-scriptable way, maybe they should replicate Norton Commander instead.
Look into far2l
Tbh, i dont understand why people want to rewrite ls of all things.
Like don't get me wrong, if they had fun, that's great.
But all i use ls for is getting a list of files. I barely ever even use the -la options. There just doesn't seem like a lot of room for improvement in something so simple.
I think the standard ls doesn't have much in terms of color/icons, so its simplicity probably makes it a great side project for improving on.
Not a big surface area, some easy improvements. A whole lot less stressful than rewriting grep (although I'm massively grateful Burnt Sushi did such a crazy thing)
Thanks @benrutter! You nailed it - ls is like the "Hello World" of system tools. Simple enough that you won't tear your hair out, but meaty enough to learn a ton. Started with "ooh, pretty colors!" and before I knew it I was deep in filesystem APIs and terminal wizardry. Way less scary than tackling grep. Sometimes the best projects are the ones where you can't mess up too badly... well, unless you accidentally delete everything while testing
> I barely ever even use the -la options.
Certainly I use these less than plain "ls," but digging through hidden files and folders and looking at timestamps is very important for me.
Well, recursive display is nice, I guess, as well as searching on partial filenames
Has been roughly doing the job since the 70s (?):
It's a rite of passage. I had some colorful 'dir' alternatives on MS-DOS 5 and eventually made my own with Turbo Pascal. Easy & fun afternoon project
Eza is great. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice the mime type icons meshed with the terminal.
Also “walk” is great for interactive navigation.
- https://github.com/antonmedv/walk
I also used eza to replace the tree command with the --tree flag.
lc: https://github.com/c-blake/lc (in Nim).
Thanks for all the feedback! Let me clarify a few things about lla. The most amazing part of this project wasn't just building another ls alternative - it was the incredible learning journey. Building a systems tool in Rust while implementing a plugin architecture taught me more in a few weeks than months of reading could have. Yes, it does more than traditional ls, and that's intentional. The plugin system came from scratching my own itch of constantly switching between different terminal tools. Each feature added was a chance to dive deeper into systems programming and Unix internals. The performance still needs work, and the documentation could be better. But that's the beauty of open source - you ship it, learn from the feedback, and keep improving. Building in public is an incredible way to level up your skills. For anyone considering a similar project: pick a common tool you use daily and try reimagining it. You'll be surprised how much you learn along the way.
Did anyone here use Genera on an original lisp machine? It had a pseudo-graphical interface and a directory listing provided clickable results. It would be really neat if we could use escaping to confer more information to the terminal about what a particular piece of text means.
Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!
Bonus points for defining a new term type and standard for this.
There's already `ls --hyperlink` for clickable results, but that depends on your terminal supporting the URL escape sequence.
This is nice, but a poor substitute for what Genera was doing.
You see, Genera knows the actual type of everything that is clickable. When a program needs an input, objects of the wrong type _lose their interactivity_ for the duration. So if you list the files in some directory, the names of those files are indeed links that you can click on. Clicking on one would bring up a context menu of relevant actions (view, edit, print, delete, etc). If a program asks for a filename as input then clicking on a file instead supplies the file object to the program. Clicking on objects of other types does nothing.
That's one aspect I prefer in playing with TempleOS over Linux. The rest of the command line is a bit of a pain, with no history, C-as-a-shell, etc.
Maybe some aspects of the Plan9 UI? (rio/9term, plumber; acme as well).
You should be able to get this to work on Unix with plan9port.
It's not really that, but have you tried ranger?
I clicked on this (without noting "github") expecting an essay on the joys of building an alternative to ls.
This is basically a Show HN without a summary I think.
fwiw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Creating command-line utilities is nice, but I personally lament the lack of man pages when people write something new.
That's the amazing part I'm talking about the learning experience you get from weeks of working on something like that is better than reading countless documentations
I have these aliases for various purposes:
# Different options to search for files
# da=36 cyan timestamps
alias ls="EZA_COLORS='da=36' eza --time-style=relative --color-scale=age"
alias lsa="ls --almost-all" # ignore . ..
alias l="ls --long --classify=always" # show file indicators
alias la="l --almost-all"
# Tree view
alias ltreea="ls --tree"
alias ltree="ltreea --level=2"
# Sort by time or size
alias lt="ls --long --sort=time"
alias lta="lt --almost-all"
# lsd is faster than eza
alias lss="lsd --long --total-size --sort=size --reverse"
alias lssa="lss --almost-all"
lla seems to go beyond what ls should do for some reason. Why show git and code complexity info? Just use tools dedicated for these things, otherwise, it will be an unmaintainable mess. If you can solve a problem easily with external tools, then there's no reason to add a feature for it.
Sounds like a fun project. However, from the readme:
Efficient file listing: Optimized for speed, even in large directories
What exactly is it doing differently to optimize for speed? Isn't it just using the regular fs lib?
On my system it uses twice as much CPU as plain old ls in a directory with just 13k files. To recursively list a directory with 500k leaf files, lla needs > 10x as much CPU. Apparently it is both slower and with higher complexity.
But it’s written in rust so it’s super fast. Did you take that into account when running your benchmarks? /s
Coloring files of the same file-type is my favorite feature. Is the extension used to group them or a MIME-header parser? I guess the extension, since it is faster.
Other than colorization, what are people getting out of ls replacements like this? I've recently started using ranger which might replace my ls usage for the most part since it not only shows everything in the directory but has vim like shortcuts for filtering, sorting, and searching the directory as well as previewing files and entering other directories
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Categorization and hashes seem to be good ideas, yet you could do all of these with other tools already. You could be knowing the tool 'exa', a similar ls alternative. Just wanted to mention.
This github page doesn't say anything about why it turned out to be amazing, seems like a fun side project.
Yeah, why use this instead of ls? What makes it worthwhile as a daily driver?
Yeah, talk about hiding the headline...
I see a screenshot that looks like the output of ls, ok it has colors, and some filenames have "!!" behind it. Great success?
Haha! Aren't all rust rewrites about colors take `bat` for example! Btw "!!" are from the git plugin, a quick way to see my workspace git status
I use git command line interface. Not because it is good (it isn't) or because I enjoy suffering (I think I don't), but because it is a standard on all the machines that have, you know, git.
What good is a ls alternative if I need to install it everywhere I need ls? I'd prefer using the standard ls even if it is not ideal. But maybe that's just me.
This is also one of the reasons I write C++ with vim without any auto-completion nor fancy plugins (I do use syntax highlighting though, but I think it comes by default with vim nowadays), as well as using GNU screen -- not every machines install tmux by default, surprisingly. In case I need to login into some random Linux box, I'm sure I'll be almost as productive as I am on my own machine.
I assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but I don't think the comparison works at all.
I spend maybe 1% of my working hours (being generous) using `ls` and something like 50% (likely more) using my editor.
If there is some alternative to `ls` that makes my `ls` workflows 2x faster, my productivity increases by 0.5%. If I use a sub-optimal editor that makes my workflow 2x slower, I lose 25% of my productivity.
When I need to login to a remote box, I am also very likely to need to use `ls` since I am less familiar than on my own machine, whereas I am unlikely to do any sort of heavy development work (typically I just need to edit a couple configuration files, or do some git operations).
I’ve been on machines in the last few years that didn’t have screen either. Maybe it was a minimal install or something, but I specifically remember having to install it to get some long running stuff going.
(Thinking it was Ubuntu server, but guessing someone will correct me)
Tmux vs screen is an odd one; it kinda feels like screen was included in the era when people were actually trying to make the default install on servers kind of nice to use with a functional set of assumed programs. And now, it is fairly widespread just due to legacy.
Nowadays, and possibly for the better (every line of code is a potential bug and every bug is a potential vulnerability) it seems like systems don’t want to include this sort of stuff. So, I’m sure if the decision were made today, tmux or screen, tmux would win. Unfortunately, “none” seems like the real future option…
What's the point of suffering everywhere if you don't enjoy it? It's not like using a better alternative prevents you from knowing how to use ls, but only in those cases where there is no better alternative
Even ls isn't standard on all machines. GNU ls is different from BSD ls.
Excellent new idea re plugins, a lot of these tools are too inflexible !
`lc` mentioned elsethread [1] was always extensible with plugins for formatting and file-typing (but also always supported libmagic-based file-typology). There are other fairly distinctive ideas in `lc`, actually.. the README has a list.
While I like it and it's a good idea, I think the reality is that developers capable enough to write shared library/DLL plugins are more likely to just submit PRs and make such stuff built-in but maybe optional.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42229841
The things I take for granted. This is a breath of fresh air! Way to rethink the fundamentals!
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
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brew support?
Great idea! I will be working on it!