> -L (dereference ALL symlinks) is not implemented; don't see why you'd ever want to follow all symlinks. Instead, -L prevents showing the symlink targets in -l.

I can tell you why I use -L in normal "ls" - to see destination sizes.

I often use symlinks to deduplicate files but still have them in relevant places. For example, I may want to keep the original filename but also have it available via a "friendlier" name too, or I may want to categorise files without loving them, etc.

In a similar vein, I also make "source trees" of ISO images that I want to build (using mkisofs) for use in emulators and such using symlinks, because I don't want to take up too much space but they're easy to handle.

In both cases, being able to occasionally see sizes of the destination files (instead of the symlink itself) can be very useful, particularly if I'm sorting by size (-S -r) or want to make a quick estimation on whether two files are the same file or not (although in that case having the size display in bytes is also useful to me. GNU is has the -h flag to show human-readable sizes, though).

Anyway, thought you might be interested in this viewpoint! This looks very nifty.

Instead of “yst” and “dby”, which are a bit cryptic and hard to localize, I would suggest “-1” and “-2”. There could be a configuration parameter for how far back (and forth) relative dates should go. And sometimes there can be file times in the future, which could use “+1” and so on.

>It differs from eza or lsd in that it has a slightly different feature set, and makes some different choices about various aspects.

Can you elaborate? Eza supports icons and I guess I prefer its color scheme, but difficult to judge without installing Elles

An interesting idea, but like `lsd` it also overlooked introspecton of extended file attributes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes).

Appropriate timing given the 2024 POSIX release. It's a good reminder that writing portable software isn't easy.

I would also take a look at exa: https://the.exa.website/

It's been my ls replacement for a while now and it's very customizable!

This looks nice. I added a package to the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/elles-bin.

This reminds me of Nushell's structured output for its `ls` command. Nice!

I’m afraid that the pipe character as a separator of columns will lead to inevitable errors in scripts or copy/paste with more parts of the output having a chance of being executed than with regular ls.

Exa is what I use now, but the column separation in Elles is pretty cool!

Would that potentially break shell scripts that rely on the standard ls behavior?