v1.8.0 — a bucket you can scan

Repositories are now listed alphabetically within each recency bucket. The buckets themselves still run newest-first, and that is still where the recency lives.

Why

Sorting inside a bucket by recency too ranked repos by a distinction the timestamps cannot really support. Everything in PAST WEEK is a week old, and which of two of them you touched at 14:02 and which at 11:40 is not something you know or can predict. The effect was that a name's position kept moving between listings for reasons nothing on screen explained — so the only way to find a repo you already had in mind was to read the group from the top.

Groups are the part you can read off the screen. Inside one, entries are peers, so a stable position is worth more than a meaningless ranking.

━━ TODAY ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  1 Cloud-Mounts        2 Driving-Checklists   3 HVAC_Repair_0726
  4 lsrecent            5 MCPJungle-Gateway    6 Twilio-Manager

Keeping the old order

It was the tool's premise for eleven versions, so it stays one flag away:

lsrepos -t                   # --time: newest-first within each bucket
lsrepos -n                   # --name: the new default, explicitly
export LSRECENT_SORT=time    # make --time the default everywhere

A flag on the command line always beats the environment variable. -t works on lsrepos, lstoday, lsyesterday and lsr <dir> alike.

One consequence worth knowing

When a listing is cut to one screenful, the bucket at the fold is now cut alphabetically rather than by age — what is missing from it is M–Z, not the oldest. Whole buckets are still dropped oldest-first.

This is only survivable because of v1.7.0: everything cut is still numbered, and the prompt searches and pages, so an elided repo is a + or a typed word away. Before that was true, cutting by age was the only defensible cut.

Also in this release

Carried over from 1.7.1, which was never published as a release:

• shell-init unaliases the names before defining them as functions. A leftover alias from 1.1.1 or earlier — lsrepos, lstoday — expanded before the parser reached lsrepos(), so re-sourcing in a long-lived shell died with syntax error near unexpected token `(' and the eval abandoned the rest. Half the grouped views silently never got defined.

Install

sudo apt install ./lsrecent_1.8.0_all.deb
lsrecent shell-install     # once per user account, if you have not already

Then open a new terminal or source ~/.bashrc — the version handshake will report the shell half as stale until you do, even though it is unchanged in this release.

v1.7.0 — the listing answers back

First packaged release. ls, in directories you nominate, becomes a
recency-grouped listing of your repositories, numbered newest-first — and the
listing ends by asking which one you want.

Install

sudo apt install ./lsrecent_1.7.0_all.deb
lsrecent shell-install     # once per user account

Then open a new terminal, and in any directory you want the grouped view:

lsrecent add               # or: lsrecent gui

The package does not edit anyone's ~/.bashrc — a root postinst has no business
writing to user dotfiles and cannot know which accounts want the override — so
shell-install is a separate, per-user, idempotent step.

python3-pyqt6 is a Recommends rather than a Depends, so this still installs on
a headless box without dragging Qt in.

The prompt is a browser

One screenful is twenty-odd repositories and the ranking behind it is routinely
two hundred plus, so a prompt that only took a number could not reach most of
what it had just numbered.

Reply	Does
23	cd into entry 23 — numbers are the ranking, not the page
text	search labels and paths, case-insensitive
/	clear the search
+	next page
-	back to the top of the view
a	the whole view, unpaged
?	help
enter, q, ctrl-d	stay put

… 238 more, numbered 21-258 · lsrepos --all to see them
→ number, text to search, + more, ? help, enter stays: noisy
 79 noisycity-api-blueprint
… 1-1 of 1 matching "noisy" · end
→ number, text to search, + more, ? help, enter stays: 79
/home/you/repos/github/smart-home/noisycity-api-blueprint

Numbers are ranking positions, so filtering and paging never renumber: 79 means
the same repository on the first screen, inside a search, and via
lsrecent path 79 tomorrow.

It stays line-oriented rather than taking over the screen. The listing is meant to
stay in your scrollback with its numbers still usable after you have moved on, and
an alternate-screen TUI would wipe exactly that on exit.

lsrecent-gui

A small PyQt6 window for choosing which directories the override applies in —
lsrecent gui, or lsrecent Directories in the launcher. It holds no state of
its own: rows come from lsrecent list, changes go through add/remove. It
flags entries whose directory has since been deleted, which is otherwise invisible.

Also in this release

• The binary and the shell functions version independently, and a terminal left
  open across an upgrade keeps the old functions. That used to present as the cd
  prompt silently not appearing; shell-init now exports its version and the
  binary says so instead. lsrecent --version reports both halves.
• remove built a sed address by interpolating the path, so any path containing
  the delimiter deleted nothing and reported success anyway.
• Man pages, generated from --help, which is itself generated from the source
  header — one source, three views.