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Comment by mavhc | Hacker News Reader

exa is hard to type, bad choice of name for something I'd be typing many times a day

Well it's too late to change now! It's one-handed, even on Dvorak, which is a bit annoying.

I don't think it's too much of an ask for people to define their own aliases for it, though. The overlap between people who install custom command-line tools and people who know how to edit their shell config can't be small.

If it was for the sake of usability, "asd" was far easier to type than "exa" where my fingers have to dance around when the name doesn't mean anything anyway.

  alias asd=exa

I already have

  alias h=ls
  alias hh='ls -l'
  alias lrt='ls -lrt'
  alias lrta='ls -lrta'

(The first two because I use Dvorak, in which case I'd use 'aoe' instead of 'asd'.)

I thought the same at first. ls is good mnemonic for list, but what exa stands for and why three letters?

"gf" for example would be better. neighbor characters on the keyboard, could stand for get files.

Furthermore, l and s are typed with different hands, which makes it quite fast to type. Exa is all left-handed, so it takes even longer.

exa can be typed by using three different fingers. Its not any significantly longer then ls which use two finger movement. Maybe even faster: I dont know what science tells us about such motions, but at my opinion fingers of one hand can be more precisely synchronized, so you really can do faster movements and lower delays between keypresses. Just try to use fingers 2-1-4 (index finger, than thumb, than ring finger) in that order, and you'll see. Or, when typing exa as part of larger text, you can use 3-1-4 sequence of fingers it allows to place palm in a way that allows fast movement into "exa" or out of it, keeping index finger free.

maybe i'm typing wrong, but i want to hit "e" and "x" with the same finger, which makes it way slower to type than ls.

things that can't be typed w/o moving your fingers from the home row are really easy to type.

> things that can't be typed w/o moving your fingers from the home row are really easy to type.

That's why some people (like me) switched to Dvorak.

Your sentence on Qwerty was 43 top, 21 middle and 12 bottom row keypresses.

On Dvorak, it's 24 top, 45 middle and just 7 bottom row characters, twice as good!

"ithout" is also entirely home-row, so you wouldn't need to bother with "w/o". The word demonstrates Dvorak's other feature nicely, hand alternation and outward-to-inwards flow:

  without
  ,gkjsfk (Qwerty equivalent)
  RLRRLLR

The letter pairs typed with the same hand go smaller-to-big finger, since "th" (Qwerty "kj") is much easier to type than "ht" ("jk") -- and "th" occurs about 7x as often in English as "ht".

I tried colemack for a little while, and was able get to up to a slowish but bearable speed (I think around 65wpm iirc) for English sentences. And it definitely felt better and was tempting to keep going.

But I ran into a few things thay ultimately made me give it up.

Oke was emacs shortcuts — it turns out I mostly don’thave these memorized as letters, but just locations. So then trying to translate from location to querty to colemack was pretty brutal.

The other big problem is you’re instantly less efficient using anyone elses computer.

And a final one was programs that chose shortcuts thoughtfully for qwerty suddenly had really randomly chosen shortcuts.

I do kind of want to give it another shot though....

Is that how you actually type, or are you speculating? With regular home row typing, e-x-a is 3-4-5, which are the hardest fingers to "drum", and even harder on three different rows. I've tried micro-optimizing special cases like this before, but then I have to think as much about typing as what I'm typing. On the other hand, I know I've hit "sl" by mistake more than a few times.

> e-x-a is 3-4-5, which are the hardest fingers to "drum", and even harder on three different rows.

Its because of the rules of blind typeing courses that says thumb should be used only for space? If you got such a courses more than a year before and already mastered blind typeing, than stop worrying. Just use thumb for `x`.

> I've tried micro-optimizing special cases like this before, but then I have to think as much about typing as what I'm typing.

It got better with practice. Like blind typeing. All you need is to train you fingers for they do it without conscious effort of thinking. Are you play on some musical instrument? Try it, it teaches how to train your fingers.

My fingers are pretty well trained for typing - around 100 WPM, 120 on a good day. As I say, I've tried tweaking my technique for special cases, but it just makes typing more laborious for little or no gain.

It could be different for others. I saw a guy who could do 100 WPM with literally two fingers, although it looked exhausting. A year of waking up with my fingers locked, simultaneously numb and throbbing in pain, taught me that maintaining a relaxed flow is more important than those last 10 WPM. But that means a few combinations like e-x-a will be tap-tap-tap instead of t-t-tap.

annoyingly, on dvorak ls is typed with the pinky of the right hand for both characters, and then I usually use the same finger to press enter again after

"exa" probably stands for "examine", though I don't know for sure.

+1. ls (or ll) is a more tangible name. a frequently used command is best to reside on the middle row of the keyboard.

Also I've noticed terminal emulators (like terminator) recognize output and sprinkle in formatting on the display.

>terminal emulators (like terminator) recognize output

iirc, if your terminal emulator is doing something funny with the output of `ls` it's because they've re-implemented it as a function and are intercepting the call to ls and running their function instead, not because they're recognizing the output.

I usually alias 'ls' to 'l' anyway, so it would not be a big deal to alias 'exa' to 'l'. I agree that exa is not exactly memorable.

Just think "examine" rather than "list" and you'll be fine.

But yeah, alias ls=exa also works.

You typically would alias replacement scripts.

Well, it can be typed easily with one hand. At least it has that going for it

"easily"

It's top row, bottom row, middle row, and the 'x' on a normal keyboard is half way to being directly under the 'e'. Very awkward and antithetical to the ideas of people who have designed keyboard layouts specifically for efficiency and ergonomics.

The only demographic that comes to mind which would find that hand position "natural" would be guitarists and other string players.

I've been playing stringed instruments for more than 10 years. The 'e' 'x' combination is probably the most spastic and slowest key combination on a qwerty keyboard. I type about 100 WPM, so typing exa doesn't take _that_ long. But it feels like it's at least 5 times slower than typing ls. Which would be really annoying for a command that you'd be typing all day.

The author could change the name to pls (pretty ls). Still easy, confortable and differentiates it from ls, while maintaining proximity.

    export pls=exa

But the tool is all about its sensible defaults (which I find justifiable).

'xa' is available on my system. Who is working on the PR?

Switch to dvorak and you'll find that 'exa' is noticeably more convenient than 'ls' :-)

You can just use an alias.

alias it.

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