zsh-aliases-exa

Purpose

This zsh plugin enables a number of aliases extending exa, the modern replacement for ls.

Use

To use it, you should first install exa. You can do so easily using Homebrew on the Mac:

brew install exa

Next, download this repo into your custom plugins directory. For my installation using Oh My Zsh, I cloned the repo to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins.

Lastly, add zsh-aliases-exa to the plugins array of your zshrc file:

plugins=(... zsh-aliases-exa)

Restart your zsh session, and the aliases will be available.

Aliases

# general use
alias ls='exa'                                                          # ls
alias l='exa -lbF --git'                                                # list, size, type, git
alias ll='exa -lbGF --git'                                             # long list
alias llm='exa -lbGd --git --sort=modified'                            # long list, modified date sort
alias la='exa -lbhHigUmuSa --time-style=long-iso --git --color-scale'  # all list
alias lx='exa -lbhHigUmuSa@ --time-style=long-iso --git --color-scale' # all + extended list

# specialty views
alias lS='exa -1'                                                              # one column, just names
alias lt='exa --tree --level=2'                                         # tree

Note: the -d option removes the display of files, filtering it to only show directories. I cannot identify a time when I want that, so I have not included it.

Next Steps

• Add in zshrc options to configure options
  1. color
  2. date format
  3. alias profiles
  4. including git column
• Create function to configure different profiles of aliases, so that different alias groups can be enabled. For example, one profile may be for replacing ls, another may leave those commands alone and use ones based on exa only.

Thanks

Big thanks to Oh My Zsh, Homebrew, and Exa for these terrific tools. They have made the command line fun again.

Contributors

• Darrin Tisdale