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0 pointscytzol8y ago0 comments

(author here)

You know what's funny? Every time I have to use ls, I'm so used to seeing the colours that I have so much trouble finding anything. Which column in the permissions is group-read? I can just scan for the green one. Which file in the listing am I supposed to be looking at? I just look for the one with the yellow underline. Colours have familiarity to me in a way that letters and words do not -- if I expect to see green and instead see grey, I'll notice it faster than if I expected to see "r" and instead see "-".

Of course, not everyone feels this way. Colour terminals are not a new invention, and if the "colour in everything" crowd was larger, someone would have made exa sooner.

That said, I don't want to go too overboard with the colours. Here's an example: when exa was in its infancy I had the bright idea to highlight the root user in red, in the same way that it highlights your current user in yellow, because, I don't know, root is "dangerous" or something. I ended up seeing so many red usernames that I stopped seeing it as "dangerous, beware" and started seeing it as "just another file" -- which completely defeated the point! Now, red is a lot more scarce (just +w permission and inodes. probably some file types. not many)

0 comments

kbenson8y ago

> Colours have familiarity to me in a way that letters and words do not -- if I expect to see green and instead see grey, I'll notice it faster than if I expected to see "r" and instead see "-".

I think the coloration is good, but I would have defaulted a bit differently in the permissions. I would have made all user bits green, all group bits orange, and all other bits red. Not only does this denote the possible security implications of the permissions, but it also maps well to what I'm usually looking for - what are my permissions, and being able to see all those quickly with green would be useful. As an added benefit, there wouldn't be as many per-character color changes in that section, so it would be less busy.

Awesome work, BTW. I love seeing interesting re-imaginings of old standby utils. I was actually thinking of doing my first real Rust project as a cat replacement. I was thinking of calling it calico. ;)

dfc8y ago

I really like a lot of the extra colors but I was also overwhelmed by the rainbow permissions. User, group, world are the organizing principle for me. World writeable is something I never want to have in my mind as similar to user writeable.

SrslyJosh8y ago

I like the colors, but I'd like to be able to configure what's colored and, more importantly, what gets bolded. For me, the bold stuff jumps out and can kind of push the non-bold stuff into the background, which makes scanning that stuff a bit harder. (In case you're wondering, I think I'd skip bolding the username and the owner perms.) Also, I think that setuid bits are probably worth bolding, because you probably shouldn't see them very often.

cytzolOP8y ago

Thanks! Configurable colours are something I'd like to get done, too. About half the work has been done to achieve this -- none of the colours are hard-coded, they're all looked up from a big Colours value that gets passed around internally. This value just needs an interface so it's configurable by the user. I've been meaning to open it up to the community instead of just defining an ad-hoc EXA_COLO[U]RS environment variable, but y'know, time.

turnspike8y ago

I'd settle for a flag that disables the rainbow perms, it seems to be a common gripe. It's nearly a dealbreaker for me. But, that's personal preference - congrats on a great util.

1 more reply

sylvinus8y ago

I feel your way too. Colours can add valuable information when done right.

Don't feel too let down by the comments on HN. Awesome work!

thibran8y ago

For me it is always difficult to see the groups in the permission groups, I would prefer the user part would have one color, the group part another... identifying if there is a r or w is not the problem. There should maybe be also between the groups a space, just to make the output more readable. Otherwise I would like to not see the file creation/change date at all, since most times it adds no valuable information. To get more verbose output - with date info, there could be something like exa -ll (make the output more verbose if there are more -l args present).

Just some ideas, maybe you like some of them :)

antjanus8y ago

I'm a big fan of this colorization. I like that I can quickly scan permissions, take note of the user, and figure out what kind of file I'm looking at. With regular 'ls', I usually have to do a double-take on all of those.

bowmessage8y ago

I heavily rely on colorization to read what I need to on the terminal. I pipe almost all of my logs through ccze by default. Thanks for this great tool -- installing.

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