Exa is a free and open source command line file lister for Linux and MacOS. You can use as a modern replacement for ls command. It comes with colours in output, viewing the Git status for a directory, recursing into directories with a tree view, supports symlinks and extended attributes, queries files in parallel, hierarchy file information, wide view and many more. It is written in Rust and released under MIT License.
How to Install exa on Ubuntu
You can install exa from the Ubuntu repository. Open the terminal app (ctrl+alt+t) and run below exa install command. It will install the latest version of exa on your system.
sudo sudo apt install exa -y
After the successful installation of exa, run below command in the terminal. It will list the contents of the current directory in a grid.
exa
Some examples:
List a tree of files, 3 levels deep with metadata
exa --long --tree --level=3
Displays a table of files with a header, file metadata, inode, and Git status.
exa --long --header --inode --git
List of files with the largest at the top
exa --oneline --reverse --sort=size
For the complete usage details run below command.
man exa