eza-community/eza

> A modern ls replacement in Rust — the community-maintained continuation of the abandoned exa.

GitHub repo · Official website · License: EUPL-1.2

Overview

eza is a single-binary command-line file lister, meant as a drop-in-ish replacement for the Unix ls. It adds colour by file type and metadata, Git status columns, icons (with Nerd Fonts), tree views, extended attributes, and human-readable relative dates — features ls either lacks or exposes awkwardly. It is written in Rust and distributes as one static-ish binary with no runtime dependencies.

eza is a hard fork of exa, Benjamin Sago's original Rust ls replacement, which had gone effectively unmaintained (its last release and largely dormant issue tracker predate the fork)¹. The fork was started in 2023 by Christina Sørensen and is now maintained by a small community organization rather than a single author — a deliberate response to the bus-factor problem that killed exa. Practically all downstream packagers (Homebrew, Arch, Nixpkgs, Debian) have migrated their exa recipes to eza.

The defining tension is scope. eza's options are, in its own words, "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ls's": it is not a byte-for-byte flag-compatible replacement, so scripts written against ls output or flags will not blindly work. It targets interactive human use — the shell alias, not the pipeline — and that framing explains most of its design choices.

Getting Started

# macOS / Linuxbrew
brew install eza
# Arch
pacman -S eza
# cargo (any platform with a Rust toolchain)
cargo install eza
# Nix flakes, no install
nix run github:eza-community/eza

# Common interactive setup — alias ls to a long, git-aware, icon'd listing
alias ls='eza --group-directories-first'
alias ll='eza -l --git --icons --header'
alias lt='eza --tree --level=2 --icons'

ll        # long view with Git status column, icons, and a header row
eza -laa  # long, all files including . and ..

Architecture / How It Works

eza is a batch renderer, not a streaming one. It reads the target directory entries, stats each, optionally queries Git, then computes a full table layout (column widths, grid packing) before printing anything. This is why the grid and --long views align perfectly — but also why it holds the whole listing in memory and why very large directories feel less instant than ls, which streams.

Notable internals:

• Git integration uses libgit2 (via the git2 crate) to read repository

status per entry. The --git column and --git-repos mode open and query the repo, which is the single largest per-call cost; --no-git (or the faster --git-repos-no-status) exists specifically to opt out.

• Icons are Unicode Private Use Area glyphs from Nerd Fonts, mapped by file

extension and name. They render as tofu boxes unless a patched Nerd Font is installed in the terminal — a frequent first-run confusion.

• Colour and theming started as LS_COLORS / EXA_COLORS environment

variable compatibility and later gained a theme.yml config file ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/eza or $EZA_CONFIG_DIR) covering both colours and icon overrides. Environment variables still win for backwards compatibility.

• Hyperlinks, mount details, SELinux context, extended attributes are all

platform-conditional columns; several are Linux/macOS-only.

The codebase is a moderately sized Rust binary crate (options parsing, an fs layer that models files and their metadata, and an output/rendering layer). The EUPL-1.2 licence² is unusual for the ecosystem — a European copyleft licence with explicit compatibility bridges to GPL-family licences — and worth noting for anyone who wants to vendor or relicense the code.

Production Notes

Do not treat it as ls in scripts. Flag semantics and output differ. If a script parses columns or depends on ls exit/format behaviour, keep ls (or command ls) there and reserve eza for interactive aliases. This is the most common real-world footgun.

Git status is not free. On large monorepos or directories inside big repositories, the per-entry Git query dominates runtime. If ll feels slow, the cause is almost always --git; drop it or use --git-repos-no-status.

Icons require font setup. Boxes/question marks mean the terminal font is not a Nerd Font, not an eza bug. --icons=never (or unsetting the alias) is the fallback; there is no way for eza to render glyphs the font does not contain.

Not flag-stable with exa. Aliases and dotfiles carried over from exa mostly work, but a few flags were renamed or changed defaults during the fork. Re-read man eza rather than assuming exa muscle memory transfers exactly.

Windows support is real but secondary. eza runs on Windows, but the metadata model (permissions, owners, mounts, SELinux, xattrs) is Unix-centric; several columns are no-ops or unavailable there.

Colour-scale and relative-date output is for humans. --color-scale, --time-style=relative, and similar are tuned for eyeballing, not machine parsing — another reason to keep it out of pipelines.

When to Use / When Not

Use when:

• You want a nicer interactive directory listing: colours, icons, tree, Git

status, sane human-readable sizes and dates.

• You already alias ls/ll/lt and want richer defaults with one binary.
• You liked exa and want a version that is still maintained and packaged.

Avoid when:

• You need strict ls/POSIX flag and output compatibility for scripts.
• You're on a minimal or embedded system where a Rust binary and libgit2 are

unwanted weight versus busybox/coreutils ls.

• You want maximal throughput on enormous directories where streaming ls (or

fd/find piped onward) beats a full-table renderer.

Alternatives

• ogham/exa — the original this forks from; effectively unmaintained, so use eza instead unless you specifically need the historical binary.
• Peltoche/lsd — the other major Rust ls replacement with icons and colours; use it when you prefer its config/theming or defaults.
• sharkdp/fd — not a lister but a find replacement; use it when you're searching/filtering files to feed a pipeline rather than displaying a directory.
• bootandy/dust — a du replacement; use it when the question is "what's taking up space," not "what's here."
• coreutils/coreutils — the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils; use its ls when you need drop-in ls compatibility with a Rust toolchain.

History

References

1. ^ exa upstream repository (unmaintained), ogham/exa. https://github.com/ogham/exa
2. ^ European Union Public Licence v1.2 (SPDX: EUPL-1.2). https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html
3. ^ eza project site and community organization. https://eza.rocks
4. ^ eza CHANGELOG, entry [0.18.13] - 2024-04-25. https://github.com/eza-community/eza/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Tags

rust, cli, ls-replacement, terminal, file-manager, coreutils, git, icons, command-line, developer-tools