Installing exa on macOS
Because exa is a command-line application that does not link to CoreFoundation or any of Apple’s UI libraries, exa is technically a Darwin program rather than a macOS application. This means that exa should work on any supported version of macOS. (It is tested regularly on 10.15 Catalina.)
Homebrew
The recommended way to install exa on macOS is to use Homebrew.
This will download and install exa, as well as the man page and shell completion files.
Manual installation
Without Homebrew, you will need to download all the files and put them in the right places yourself.
- The exa binary
You will need to download exa’s macOS binary and place it somewhere executable.
/usr/local/bin
is the recommended place to put it, but any of the directories listed in/etc/paths
will work. - The man page
You will need to download exa’s man page and put it in the directory for application man pages,
/usr/share/man/man1
. - Shell completion files
macOS ships with the
bash
andzsh
shells, and exa has completions for both.For
bash
, you will need to install bash-completion first. Then, download exa’s bash completions and put them in the bash-completion directory. This varies between OSes, but is likely to be/etc/bash_completion.d
, so try that.For
zsh
, download the zsh completions, and put them in/usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions
.