Re: icon support for ls

[Gokcehan Kara]

Cool hack indeed. It never occurred to me that this may already be
working. Although line wrapping does not work nicely in my terminal. I
guess this is what you mean by alignment consideration.

Also, I could not find a way to set the following entries in your
example using `dircolors`:

    LS_COLORS='lc=:rc=:rs=:'

In the source I see the following values are used:

    $LS_COLORS  dircolors               default
    lc          LEFT  (also LEFTCODE)   \033[
    rc          RIGHT (also RIGHTCODE)  m
    rs          RESET                   0

In dircolors configuration file, I tried to set these values to empty as
such:

    ...
    LEFT
    RIGHT
    RESET
    ...

But then the file is not parsed correctly and I get the following
errors:

    dircolors: .dircolors:44: invalid line;  missing second token
    dircolors: .dircolors:45: invalid line;  missing second token
    dircolors: .dircolors:46: invalid line;  missing second token

Another problem is that when these values are set to empty, one needs to
manually add these to color codes if s/he wants to use colors and icons
at the same time. It may not be desirable to have escape characters in
the configuration file and the environmental variable.

Alternatively, I was thinking this could be implemented by adding an
optional third column to `dircolors` entries. This has the advantage of
being backwards compatible as well. `$LS_COLORS` variable needs to adopt
a similar strategy to have optional icon values in the entries which may
require an additional separator:

    ... :di=01;34|D: ...

    ('|' is used as the separator and 'D' is used as the icon)

On the `ls` side, I guess these icon values need to be considered to
calculate filename lenghts properly for the alignment. Maybe icons can
be limited to 1 or 2 characters which should be fine for most cases.

Gokcehan


On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:32 AM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 14/05/18 15:07, Gokcehan Kara wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Apologies if this has been discussed before.
> >
> > There has been some interest for showing icons for different files in
> `ls`
> > lately. I have found the following projects attempting this:
> >
> >     https://github.com/illinoisjackson/better-ls/
> >     https://github.com/ryanoasis/devicons-shell
> >     https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls
> >
> > There are some others trying to modify `ls` source for this purpose:
> >
> >     https://github.com/illinoisjackson/even-better-ls
> >     https://github.com/sebastiencs/ls-icons
> >
> > Though I doubt these have been submitted back as patches.
> >
> > There are already some interesting unicode icons in the standard:
> >
> >     🗀 Folder         U+1F5C0
> >     🗁 Open Folder    U+1F5C1
> >     🗋 Empty Document U+1F5CB
> >     🗌 Empty Page     U+1F5CC
> >     🗍 Empty Pages    U+1F5CD
> >     🗎 Document       U+1F5CE
> >     🗏 Page           U+1F5CF
> >     🗐 Pages          U+1F5D0
> >
> > There are also specialized fonts with support for various icons:
> >
> >     https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
> >     https://github.com/sebastiencs/icons-in-terminal
> >
> > I was thinking a similar mechanism as the color option could be used for
> > icons
> > as well. Maybe `dircolors` can be used to export an `$LS_ICONS` variable
> > from a
> > configuration file. Or maybe this could be directly added to `$LS_COLORS`
> > variable somehow.
> >
> > What do you think such a feature?
>
> An interesting proposal, though less general on the terminal due
> to space available and alignment considerations.
>
> Note you can sort of hack it now with LS_COLORS like:
>
> LS_COLORS='lc=:rc=:rs=:'
> LS_COLORS="${LS_COLORS}di=🗀 :fi=🗋 :ln=  :do=  :cd=  :bd=  :so=  :pi=  :"
> LS_COLORS="${LS_COLORS}ex=:tw=:ow=:st=:su=:sg=:"
> export LS_COLORS
>
> Which generates nicely aligned output on my terminal at least:
> For example: ls /proc/$$
>
> 🗀 attr               cwd      🗋 loginuid    🗋 numa_maps      🗋
> schedstat  🗀 task
> 🗋 autogroup        🗋 environ  🗀 map_files   🗋 oom_adj        🗋
> sessionid  🗋 timers
> 🗋 auxv               exe      🗋 maps        🗋 oom_score      🗋
> setgroups  🗋 timerslack_ns
> 🗋 cgroup           🗀 fd       🗋 mem         🗋 oom_score_adj  🗋 smaps
>     🗋 uid_map
> 🗋 clear_refs       🗀 fdinfo   🗋 mountinfo   🗋 pagemap        🗋 stack
>     🗋 wchan
> 🗋 cmdline          🗋 gid_map  🗋 mounts      🗋 personality    🗋 stat
> 🗋 comm             🗋 io       🗋 mountstats  🗋 projid_map     🗋 statm
> 🗋 coredump_filter  🗋 latency  🗀 net           root           🗋 status
> 🗋 cpuset           🗋 limits   🗀 ns          🗋 sched          🗋 syscall
>
> cheers,
> Pádraig
>