exa

Command-line options

The main way to configure exa is by passing options on the command-line.

Displays one file per line.

Displays files as a grid.

This is the default.

Displays files in a table along with their metadata.

Sort the grid across, rather than downwards.

Recurses into directories.

Recurses into directories as a tree.

Limits the depth of recursion, so exa only descends up to the given number of times.

Displays file type indicators by file names.

Configures when to use terminal colours. The default choice is automatic, meaning that colours are used when exa is writing to a terminal, and are switched off if it’s not.

• automatic or auto only display colours when writing to a terminal.
• always displays them even if it’s not.
• never doesn’t display them even if it is.

Displays Unicode icons by file names.

Don’t display icons (overrides --icons).

Shows hidden and ‘dot’ files.

Use this twice to also show the . and .. directories.

Lists directories without recursing into them, as though they were regular files.

Reverses the sort order.

Configures which field to sort by.

• name or filename sorts by name, case-insensitively.
• Name or Filename sorts by name, case-sensitively.
• cname or cfilename sorts by name, case-insensitively and canonically.
• Cname or Cfilename sorts by name, case-sensitively and canonically.
• .name or .filename sorts by name without a leading dot, case-insensitively.
• .Name or .Filename sorts by name without a leading dot, case-sensitively.
• size or filesize sorts by size, with smaller files listed first.
• ext or extension sorts by file extension, case-insensitively.
• Ext or Extension sorts by file extension, case-sensitively.
• mod or modified sorts by file modified date, with older files listed first.
• acc or accessed sorts by file accessed date.
• cr or created sorts by file created date.
• inode sorts by file inode.
• type sorts by the type of file (directory, socket, link).
• none disables sorting, and lists files in an arbitrary order.

The modified field has the aliases date, time, and new, and newest. Also, because we usually think about dates relatively, its reverse has the aliases age, old, and oldest.

Fields starting with a capital letter will sort uppercase before lowercase.

Canonical sorting means that numbers will be treated as strings of digits instead of numbers. Normally, 9 comes before 10, but sorting by Cname will sort 10 before 9 because it sees the 1 digit first.

Glob patterns, pipe-separated, of files to ignore.

Ignores files mentioned in .gitignore.

Lists directories before other files when sorting.