If you spend any time in a terminal, ls is probably muscle memory. It works. But eza shows what a listing command can do when it's rebuilt from the ground up: a single small fast binary that knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git, designed to be a more featureful, more user-friendly ls.
eza is the community-maintained fork of exa, the once-popular Rust listing tool that was abandoned around 2021. Its last release shipped a known "Grid Bug" that eza later fixed. Today eza lives under the eza-community group and sits at version 0.23.5 (released July 2026).
Why switch?
Three things jump out on day one. eza colorizes output automatically so file types are easy to tell apart. It uses a grid layout by default, which packs more files into each screen without wrapping into ugly columns. And it has built-in Git awareness, so you can see repo and file status right in the directory listing. That last one alone is worth the switch if you work in Git repos all day.
Installing eza
The easy path depends on your OS:
- macOS:
brew install eza - Ubuntu/Debian: the community apt repository at deb.gierens.de, or a distro package where available
- Fedora:
dnf install eza - Arch: available in the extra repository
- From source:
cargo install eza
Flags worth learning
eza is a near-drop-in for common ls usage, so the basics feel familiar. Add these to go further:
-l/--long: extended metadata table-T/--tree: recurse as a tree, e.g.eza --tree --level=2--icons: file-type icons (needs a Nerd Font)--hyperlink: render files as terminal hyperlinks-h/--header: show a header row-b/--binary: binary size prefixes-B/--bytes: raw byte sizes-1/--oneline: one entry per line
The Git integration
Pair -l with --git and eza adds a two-character column showing staged and unstaged change status for each file. Add --git-repos and each directory gets marked as a clean or dirty repository: |= means clean, += means dirty. Glance at a listing and you instantly know the state of your working tree.
Sorting
Control ordering with --sort. The default is name; you can also sort by size, modified, or extension. Reverse any sort with -r. For instance, biggest files on top: eza -l --sort=size -r.
Make it your everyday command
The simplest way to get the most out of eza is to alias ls to it. Add one of these to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:
alias ls='eza'
Reload your shell and eza becomes your everyday listing command. Fork of an abandoned tool or not, it's genuinely more useful than the ls you grew up with.