I finally took the time to try exa, “a modern replacement for ls”.
This is a brief article for installing exa in Arch Linux with an additional package for the icon fonts (in a few installations, boxes were shown instead of icons, that’s why I’m writing this blog article, hoping to save you some time).
Installing exa in Arch is just a matter of running:
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sudo pacman -S exa |
However, you need a “Nerd” font to get the icon symbols. This is the one I install:
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sudo pacman -S ttf-arimo-nerd |
In EndeavourOS KDE, this should already be installed. I seem to understand that this is not the case for EndeavourOS GNOME. If these fonts are not installed, you can install them with the command above and make sure to reboot.
The output is excellent, and I aliased many of my previous ls commands to exa:
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alias l='exa -lah --color=always --group-directories-first --icons' # with headers alias la='exa -al --color=always --group-directories-first --icons' # all files and dirs alias ll='exa -l --color=always --group-directories-first --icons' # long format |
This is the beautiful colored output you get, and note the icons for directories and known files types in Gnome (in particular, a “cup of coffee” for Java files):
The same holds for KDE:
I also have another alias for the tree output of exa:
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alias lt='exa -aT --color=always --group-directories-first --icons' # tree listing |
And this is the output:
Note the “–git-ignore” command line argument to ask exa to skip all the files that match the patterns in the current “.gitignore” file.
Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂
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