On 6 October 2017 at 13:22, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> Yep. My real beef with ls is multi-column vs single-column. >> Paul > > You don't think multiple columns in interactive mode is useful? I'm surprised, > because I find it invaluable.
Interactively, I use ls -l 99.9% of the time. When I use raw ls, the column format is OK, but the fact that the number of columns varies depending on the filename length is really annoying (one really long filename can really mess the layout up). > I would hate for `ls` to default to printing everything in one long column. I > suppose I could define an alias, but then every time I'm on a different > computer or running as a different user, I'd end up with the annoying default > single column again. And that's precisely why carefully defining the defaults is both crucial and hard :-) I don't think the designers of ls necessarily got it wrong. But I'm one of the (small, presumably) group who find it sub-optimal. That's OK - you can't please all of the people all of the time and all that :-) What *really* bugs me is colour settings that default to dark blues on a black background. Someone, presumably an admin who set the system up, worked on a light-background system, and defined defaults that are good for them. And which are illegible for every single one of the actual users who have black-background ssh clients. Add the fact that I work on shared admin accounts, where setting non-default preferences is considered an antisocial act (even when they are "better" ;-)) and I spend my life squinting at screens, or typing "unalias ls" to remove the --color setting. Luckily (for everyone who has to listen to me rant), this is "just" annoyingly badly configured systems, and not baked in program defaults. Paul -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
