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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

Main feature here seems to be colors, but GNU `ls` can also color files based on their file extension and also differentiate between pipes, executables, and working and broken links [1].

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/dirc...

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It does a lot more than just colours. It has git integrations, a more concise output, built-in tree, grid view, icons (note they're not showing correctly in below output) and much more.

    $ ll
    drwxrwxr-x    - dan 27 Oct 15:12 -I  .idea
    .rw-rw-r--   15 dan  9 Sep 11:44 -N  .tool-versions
    drwxrwxr-x    - dan  9 Sep 11:53 -I  dist
    drwxrwxr-x    - dan 23 Sep 18:53 --  docs
    .rw-rw-r--  376 dan 29 Jun 12:26 -I  some-project.iml
    drwxr-xr-x    - dan 10 Sep 12:28 -I  node_modules
    .rw-rw-r--  301 dan 21 Oct 13:17 -N  override.env

edit: if it wasn't clear, the above output is a subset of the real output.

> icons (note they're not showing correctly in below output)

This is often my biggest annoyance with command line tools that rely on dedicate fonts and private use icons. The functionality is great, but making sure you've got the right fonts installed on every machine/terminal is sometimes tedious enough that I give up on things like exa.

These days I think exa does not show icons by default, which is I think the right decision.

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