freshl

A modern replacement for ls.

Behavior

freshl supports the greatest hits of ls options: -R, -S, -t, -r, and -d.

Unlike ls, -S and -t put the largest/newest files at the bottom of the output. Also unlike ls, you can use -r again to double-reverse: -rt will output the oldest files last. -rr or -rrrr will have no effect, but you can ls like a pirate.

-R skips gitignored and dotfile dirs by default. Like ripgrep, -u lifts that one level at a time: -u descends into gitignored dirs, and -uu also descends into dotfile dirs.

Symlinks are always followed: a row reads name → target (or name → mid → target for multi-hop), with the final target in its natural per-kind color. A broken link still shows the full chain up to the break, with the unresolved target in red; its mode and size columns are dimmed, since they describe the link itself rather than a resolved file.

Display

Color output is configured with $LS_COLORS, compatible with GNU ls. Apart from that, there are no display options. You get it my way.

• Integrated Git status.
• File modes are in octal, e.g., 644 instead of rw-r--r--.
• Timestamps are always UTC.
• Directories sort first. Since symlinks-to-directories are followed, they sort with their targets.
• On case-insensitive filesystems, such as APFS, sorting is case-insensitive.

There is also context-sensitive dimming to deemphasize less-useful information:

• File modes are dimmed if they are the default for your current umask.
• Owners are dimmed if they match the owner of the containing directory.
• Groups are dimmed if they are the primary group for that user.
• If a file size is 1 MB or more, the low-order digits are dimmed in groups of six. For example, a file of size 14142135 would have only 14 undimmed.
• Timestamps are dimmed progressively with age, leaving undimmed the part that best distinguishes them from now: the day and HH:MM:SS at first, the day and HH:MM after an hour, the month and day after 24 hours, and the full date after six months. Future timestamps are fully undimmed.

Recommended usage

if which freshl >/dev/null; then
    alias l='freshl'
else
    alias l='ls -lA'
fi