Among a few things it does that `ls` (and other alternatives like `eza` don't do) are: - icons (SVG icons in terminals that support it, Nerd Fonts otherwise) - advanced filtering using regex - advanced sorting across multiple sort bases - styles and colors using customisable rules
For someone wanting to make the output of `ls` prettier (with a few extra bells and whistles) without having to relearn a new workflow, something like an `ls` replacement makes more sense.
[1]: https://pls.cli.rs [2]: https://dystroy.org/broot/
`eza --long --hyperlink --header --all --icons --git --sort name`
also the hyperlink thing is useful
This tool by triyanox -- just from the screen shot if you click through -- will also colorize permission masks and sizes, dates, user & group.
Two settings for ls make some of the colouring less useful to me.
BLOCK_SIZE='1 formats sizes in bytes with comma separators. TIME_STYLE=long-iso formats the dates sensibly.
This means entries line up in neater columns.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 852 2024-02-23 22:31 zsh5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1,022,760 2024-08-09 04:33 zstd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2024-08-09 04:33 zstdcat -> zstdIn `lc`, mentioned a bit this thread, you can actually color the age like a "heat map" if you want. I.e. more recent times are more toward the red side of the rainbow and older ages toward the other "cooler" side ("cold storage"). Or whatever color scheme you like. So, if you know you're looking for something recent, the color pops out at you. If you like that kind of thing.