Eza: A modern, maintained replacement for ls

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Adoption & Workflow Integration

  • Many users alias eza (or previously exa) to ls, ll, etc., and report years of trouble‑free use, especially for interactive work.
  • Others refuse to replace ls, citing portability, muscle memory, and the need to be instantly effective on random servers, containers, or coworkers’ machines.
  • Several people say they barely use ls anymore due to shell features: Fish’s Alt+L, automatic ls on cd, zsh/bashi hooks, zoxide/autojump, fzf, or file managers like mc.

Comparison with ls, exa, and lsd

  • eza is a community fork of the now‑unmaintained exa; some want this stated more clearly in the README.
  • Benchmarks in the thread: eza is slightly faster than lsd, but plain ls is still fastest; for most, speed differences are negligible.
  • eza is seen as more feature‑rich (tree view, git status columns, many options) but sometimes less ls‑compatible (ls -lrt semantics differ, hyperlink handling surprises).
  • lsd is preferred by some for its behavior and fewer bugs; others prefer eza’s richer options.

Colors, Theming, and Readability

  • Strong split: some rely heavily on colorized output; others actively disable colors because themes clash with their terminal background or reduce contrast.
  • Suggestions include --color=never, the NO_COLOR env var, curated themes (Solarized/base16, vivid/LS_COLORS), and terminals enforcing minimum contrast.
  • Some find eza’s default output visually “busy.”

Home Directory & XDG Debates

  • A long sub‑thread debates clutter in $HOME vs XDG dirs (~/.config, ~/.local/share, ~/.cache).
  • One camp views single‑app dotdirs as human‑oriented organization (“one closet per app”).
  • The other values standardized separation for backups, caches, and tooling, and encourages honoring XDG_* env vars.

Dates & Time Display

  • Several complain about “human readable” relative times (“1 day ago”) in tools and web UIs, preferring exact timestamps or both.
  • Relative times are seen as lossy (especially around year and month boundaries) and problematic on mobile when precise times are only available via hover.

Licensing, Maintenance, and Messaging

  • eza is MIT‑licensed; one commenter dislikes permissive licenses for GNU/Linux stacks, while others note most Rust tools are MIT/Apache.
  • Confusion over the tagline “modern, maintained replacement for ls”: some read it as implying ls is unmaintained; others clarify it was meant relative to exa.
  • Static Rust binaries are noted as needing active maintenance for dependency security updates.