exa is a replacement for the ls command, designed to provide a more user-friendly and colorful interface, similar to what bat aims to achieve.

Background

After briefly trying exa, I decided to alias it to replace ls for a trial period. Then I discovered that the ls -al --ignore="[^.]*" command couldn’t be directly replaced since exa doesn’t have an ignore parameter.

Testing Commands

After checking the documentation, I found that exa supports filtering based on glob syntax (Filtering section in the docs).

So the command to display only dotfiles should be:

exa -la --ignore-glob="[!.]*"

Here, "!" means “not include”.

Adding Aliases

Finally, my modified rc file looks like this (the color option is just for convenience when switching back to ls, as exa enables colors by default):

alias ls='exa'
alias l.='exa -la --ignore-glob="[!.]*"'
alias ll='ls --color=auto -l'
alias la='ls --color=auto -la'

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