(This repository isn’t archived because the only person with the rights to do so is unreachable).
exa is a modern replacement for the venerable file-listing command-line program ls that ships with Unix and Linux operating systems, giving it more features and better defaults. It uses colours to distinguish file types and metadata. It knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git. And it’s small, fast, and just one single binary.
By deliberately making some decisions differently, exa attempts to be a more featureful, more user-friendly version of ls. For more information, see exa’s website.
exa’s options are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ls’s.
.gitignorePass the --all option twice to also show the . and .. directories.
These options are available when running with --long (-l):
Some of the options accept parameters:
exa is available for macOS and Linux. More information on how to install exa is available on the Installation page.
On Alpine Linux, enable community repository and install the exa package.
On Arch, install the exa package.
On Android / Termux, install the exa package.
On Debian, install the exa package.
On Fedora, install the exa package.
On Gentoo, install the sys-apps/exa package.
If you’re using Homebrew on macOS, install the exa formula.
If you're using MacPorts on macOS, install the exa port.
On nixOS, install the exa package.
On openSUSE, install the exa package.
On Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) and later, install the exa package.
On Void Linux, install the exa package.
Compiled binary versions of exa are uploaded to GitHub when a release is made. You can install exa manually by downloading a release, extracting it, and copying the binary to a directory in your $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin.
For more information, see the Manual Installation page.
If you already have a Rust environment set up, you can use the cargo install command:
Cargo will build the exa binary and place it in $HOME/.cargo.
To build without Git support, run cargo install --no-default-features exa is also available, if the requisite dependencies are not installed.
exa is written in Rust. You will need rustc version 1.66.1 or higher. The recommended way to install Rust for development is from the official download page, using rustup.
Once Rust is installed, you can compile exa with Cargo:
The just command runner can be used to run some helpful development commands, in a manner similar to make. Run just --list to get an overview of what’s available.
If you are compiling a copy for yourself, be sure to run cargo build --release or just build-release to benefit from release-mode optimisations. Copy the resulting binary, which will be in the target/release directory, into a folder in your $PATH. /usr/local/bin is usually a good choice.
To compile and install the manual pages, you will need pandoc. The just man command will compile the Markdown into manual pages, which it will place in the target/man directory. To use them, copy them into a directory that man will read. /usr/local/share/man is usually a good choice.
exa depends on libgit2 for certain features. If you’re unable to compile libgit2, you can opt out of Git support by running cargo build --no-default-features.
If you intend to compile for musl, you will need to use the flag vendored-openssl if you want to get the Git feature working. The full command is cargo build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --features vendored-openssl,git.
For more information, see the Building from Source page.
exa uses Vagrant to configure virtual machines for testing.
Programs such as exa that are basically interfaces to the system are notoriously difficult to test. Although the internal components have unit tests, it’s impossible to do a complete end-to-end test without mandating the current user’s name, the time zone, the locale, and directory structure to test. (And yes, these tests are worth doing. I have missed an edge case on many an occasion.)
The initial attempt to solve the problem was just to create a directory of “awkward” test cases, run exa on it, and make sure it produced the correct output. But even this output would change if, say, the user’s locale formats dates in a different way. These can be mocked inside the code, but at the cost of making that code more complicated to read and understand.
An alternative solution is to fake everything: create a virtual machine with a known state and run the tests on that. This is what Vagrant does. Although it takes a while to download and set up, it gives everyone the same development environment to test for any obvious regressions.
First, initialise the VM:
The first command downloads the virtual machine image, and then runs our provisioning script, which installs Rust and exa’s build-time dependencies, configures the environment, and generates some awkward files and folders to use as test cases. Once this is done, you can SSH in, and build and test:
host$ vagrant ssh
vm$ cd /vagrant
vm$ cargo build
vm$ ./xtests/run
All the tests passed!
Of course, the drawback of having a standard development environment is that you stop noticing bugs that occur outside of it. For this reason, Vagrant isn’t a necessary development step — it’s there if you’d like to use it, but exa still gets used and tested on other platforms. It can still be built and compiled on any target triple that it supports, VM or no VM, with cargo build and cargo test.
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