Allow putting directories on top

[tomassedovic]

ls has the --group-directories-first option which prints the directories first (sorted by name) and files after:

$ ls -1 --group-directories-first
src
target
Cargo.lock
Cargo.toml
LICENCE
README.md
screenshot.png

vs.

$ exa -1
Cargo.lock
Cargo.toml
LICENCE
README.md
screenshot.png
src
target

Could something like this be added to exa? It would probably have to be a separate switch (since you can only have a single sort, but putting directories first is orthogonal to e.g. sorting by an extension).

[ogham]

If ls does it, there's no reason why exa shouldn't.

[tomassedovic]

Awesome, thanks :-).

What's the general approach with ls-compatibility? Some of the options are already different: -h in ls means "show file sizes in a human readable format" which exa does by default and there it means "show the header row".

Are you shooting for a similar feature set (but nicer defaults and new stuff like the git support) but possibly different options? Or is it more of a case-by-case thing?

[ogham]

It's more the former, but there will be things I'll have to decide on a case-by-case basis. In a way, I'm thinking: if it were up to me to write ls, how would I write it? I would have used prefixes by default, since that's what you want >99% of the time - which just happens to free up -h. I think showing groups by default clutters up the output, so instead of having an option to take them away, there's an option to add them. However, I also get the benefit that exa isn't installed by default, so I get to add features like Git support that some people would consider "bloat".

Just because ls has something doesn't automatically mean that exa should support it too - but it looks like showing directories first is a popular-enough option that it should be included. (For what it's worth, I have no idea why anyone would ever choose that option, but as long as some people like it!)

[ogham]