Best listing of directory and file information

ls --help has lots of information, but for an overview of what it actually shows you, this is more helpful: https://www.computerhope.com/unix/uls.htm

ls is not the way to the best listing of directory and file information, in my opinion. Even with all the options it has, it doesn’t have basic ones like, don’t show me the ‘hard links’ column that almost no one knows what it’s about anyway. (Here’s what it’s about: https://bertvv.github.io/notes-to-self/2015/10/18/the-number-of-hard-links-in-ls--l/ )

ls -AgG1 --time-style='+%F %k:%M'

is about as far as i got before giving up on ls.

UPDATE. Went back to ls. After a bunch of iterations, pretty happy with this:

ls -AgG1 --time-style="+%y-%m-%d %k:
%b %d %k:%M" --group-directories-first

Yes that’s a linebreak in there. I couldn’t write it to test it on the command line, but putting it in my .bashrc customizations worked. What it does is the before-the-linebreak is shown for recent files (which seems to be in the past).

Actually pasted in with the line break, you can use it and edit it on the command line. I decided to go back to human-readable filesizes, because it does keep it shorter, and the letter at least indicates what that column is about, so i’ll just try to remember to notice.

ls -AghG1 --time-style="+%y-%m-%d %k:
%b %d %k:%M" --group-directories-first

Thus endeth this saga for now. For the record…

… other, more bizarre avenues:

Found exa.

Unfortunately for exa, i uninstalled Rust and Cargo after the Pop OS / Ubuntu package manager constantly showed them as needing updates, even though they didn’t, no matter how many times the update was run.

Trying out nnn now; it’s a full file commander / manager thing but it works fine for listing. Works better than ranger, certainly, for that lighter use.

All the “better than ls” alternatives, including new beasts of file managers like nnn, promote having human-readable filenames by default.

I sort of don’t want the human readable, because the difference between a K or an M or G is less noticeable than three digits, and i drop the units off mentally all the time.