exa - An Alternative to ls

last updated 2021-09-03

I just discovered the commandline tool exa. It serves as a modern replacement for ls and tree. Additionally it shows little icons of the filetype in its output.

To use it it you can simply download the binary from the release page and add it to your PATH.

To make it work with my setup I had to add these aliases:

alias ls="exa --icons --group-directories-first"
alias la="ll -a"                                
alias tree="exa --tree"

The standard font on my Debian/Ubuntu system does not show all icons. Therefore another font is needed. A font from Nerd Fonts can be used. To download them is described in this gist:

Download a Nerd Font
Unzip and copy to ~/.fonts
Run the command fc-cache -fv to manually rebuild the font cache

Finally in my terminal the output la looks like this:

(it shows the content of the repository address-formatter, which is a useful JavaScript package for creating human readable addresses of places)