>Yes, it matters a lot.

No, not at all.

>These tools are supposed to be fast.

And they are. Just not faster than ls, which is already fast itself.

>I use them all the time, and if there is a tool that does the same but one takes 1 sec and the other one takes 30 seconds, then of course I am going to pick the faster one.

Only if it matters.

If it takes 200ms and the other 250ms nobody's going to care. Especially if the second tool does more, and especially if the use case is "listing of regular dirs where better human-readability matters" (not 20K+ file dirs).

The same way we also program Python or JS or Lisp and not just C and Rust, even though the latter are faster.

Yes, it matters to me because I use it often, and many directories have lots of files in them.

I do not care if the difference is 200 ms vs 250 ms, but if it is 1 sec vs 10 seconds, then yeah, it is a deal-breaker.

I did not try exa, so I cannot speak against it, nor in favor of it. It would only be fair if I used it and noticed that there are significant performance issues with it.

I don't think anyone would use a tool if it were 180x slower than the alternative. I strongly doubt that's the case here.

(to clarify the "180x" math: (10s - 1s) / (250ms - 200ms) = 9s / 50ms = 180)

I only took a quick glance at the OP's https://asciinema.org stuff. Exa seemed way slower in comparison to ls. Again, I would have to test it myself and see how much it affects me if at all. That said, I do not see a reason to switch to it because ls supports colors as well, and I do not need the added extra information. Welp.

I do as well, but I guess none of my use cases have involved either listing absurd amounts of files nor have I used ls or exa in any scripts. I do use exa and ls (usually on systems where I don't have exa installed or when I forget to type "sl" instead) The difference has been barely noticeable for me

From what I have read here, it diesnt look loke anyone dislikes exa. The only thing I'd change is the messaging.

Instead of saying modern replacement to ls, I'd rather we be more specific and say "a modern replacement to ls for some interactive workloads" or something like that. This makes it clear that the ask is not that we remove the ls binary and put exa alias.

I've been using exa for the better part of a decade and never noticed any delay whatsoever.