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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool - bringing the great treatment of `ack` to ls. And can confirm how fast it is!

The unix philosophy is a great idea, but it doesn't really lead to a good experience. Glad people are making more integrated tools!

Oh, and It's in homebrew already: `brew install exa`

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When I release a new version of exa, I upload the code and binaries to GitHub, and then someone else whom I have never met but very much appreciate takes it and publishes it to Homebrew, then a few days later I download and start using it.

It's the slowest file copy mechanism I've ever used!

You should buy that person a beer if you ever find out who it is.

Plot twist: What if it turns out that it was you all along! :O A la Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde :)

> The unix philosophy is a great idea, but it doesn't really lead to a good experience. Glad people are making more integrated tools!

Bit ironical, as ls already is pretty "non-unixy" and has way too many features tacked into it.

From purism point of view it would make more sense that ls would be just a list of files and let other utilities (stat, sort, etc) handle the rest.

That would be great. Probably about 40% of all issues in bash scripts I see is people trying to parse ls because they don't know other tools. It would be amazing if ls reigned in the features some so people learned better tools.

That's got UX backwards. You'd want to minimize the effort user has to make, no?

I don't really think that minimizing user efffort was part of the Unix philosophy, but rather to have tools do one thing well and be able to become input to another program that does something else well.

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