What is it? exa is ls reimagined for modern times, in Rust. And more colorfully. It is nifty, but not life-changing. I mostly still use ls, because muscle memory is strong and its basically the only mildly friendly thing about Unix.

How do I do boring old ls things?

Spoiler alert: basically the same.

  • ls -a: exa -a
  • ls -l: exa -l
  • ls -lR: exa -lR

How do I do things I rarely had the gumption to do with ls?

  • exa -rs created: simple listing, sort files reverse by created time. Other options: name, extension, size, type, modified, accessed, created, inode
  • exa -hl: show a long listing with headers for each column
  • exa -T: recurse into directories ala tree
  • exa -l --git: show git metadata alongside file info