els

els = ls with emoji icons

This is a simple wrapper for ls written in ruby (version 1.9.3 or higher) to display emoji icons alongside file names. It was written and tested on MacOS X which uses the BSD version of ls. It will also work with the GNU ls.

Installation

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AnthonyDiGirolamo/els/master/els
chmod +x els

Then place it somewhere in your $PATH

Options

All arguments are passed along to ls with the exception of:

• --els-no-color disables the built in color handling.
• --els-icons=fontawesome uses icons provided by FontAwesome

Using FontAwesome requires that you install the FontAwesome.otf by double clicking on it in OSX. To actually use it in your terminal you need iTerm2 for OSX and change your Non-ASCII Font to FontAwesome in your profile preferences as in this screen shot:

To use it in Linux within gnome-terminal you need to put FontAwesome.otf inside your ~/.fonts/ folder on Linux. And create a ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file with the following content:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
<!-- Font families -->
<alias>
  <family>serif</family>
  <prefer>
    <family>DejaVu Serif</family>
    <family>Android Emoji</family>
    <family>Symbola</family>
  </prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
  <family>sans-serif</family>
  <prefer>
    <family>DejaVu Sans</family>
    <family>Android Emoji</family>
    <family>Symbola</family>
  </prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
  <family>monospace</family>
  <prefer>
    <family>Ubuntu Mono</family> <!-- change this to your prefered monospace font if you like -->
    <family>DejaVu Sans Mono</family>
    <family>Android Emoji</family> <!-- put the Symbola line before this if you prefer Symbola to Android Emoji -->
    <family>Symbola</family>
    <family>FontAwesome</family>
  </prefer>
</alias>
</fontconfig>

Colors

els honors the $LS_COLORS environment variable and expects the GNU format (not BSD!). This is usually set by the dircolors command in Linux. If $LS_COLORS is not set els will use a default setting. This lets you use OSXs default BSD ls but still the GNU $LS_COLORS features.

If you want the GNU version of ls on OSX use homebrew to install coreutils. It will then be available as gls. (This isn't required).

brew install coreutils

Adding/Changing Icons

You can add your own icons and extensions by editing the source. Fork this repo and send me a pull request if you do so everyone can enjoy your changes.

Notes on implementation

This script started out using lots of regexes but that turned out to be very slow. Now simple string matching is used to detect extensions and ls -F classifiers.

The column formatting tries to reduce the amount of horizontal whitespace and maximize the number of columns. Using -l will disable it of course.