bestls

A fast, colorful, and Rust-powered replacement for the traditional ls command.

bestls provides human-readable file listings in both pretty tables and JSON formats, with sorting and other modern CLI conveniences built for speed and usability.

✨ Features

• 🎨 Colorful output - Beautiful colored tables for easy reading
• 📊 Multiple formats - Output as tables, compact JSON, or pretty JSON
• ⚡ Blazing fast - Parallel metadata fetching with Rayon
• 📏 Human-readable - File sizes in KB, MB, GB format
• 🔧 Flexible sorting - Sort by name, size, or modification date
• 👁️ Hidden files - View hidden files with --all flag
• 🔒 File permissions - Unix-style permission display
• 👥 Owner info - File owner and group information
• 🔄 Shell completion - Built-in completion for Bash, Zsh, and Fish
• 🪶 Lightweight - Single binary with no external dependencies

📦 Installation

From crates.io

cargo install bestls

From source

git clone https://github.com/MurtadaNazar/bestls.git
cd bestls
cargo build --release

The binary will be available at target/release/bestls.

🚀 Usage

Basic Commands

List current directory:

bestls

List specific directory:

bestls -p /path/to/directory

Output Formats

Pretty table (default):

bestls

Compact JSON:

bestls --json

Pretty formatted JSON:

bestls --json-pretty

Sorting Options

Sort by file size:

bestls -s size

Sort by modification date:

bestls -s date

Sort by name (default):

bestls -s name

Shell Completions

bestls provides shell completions for Bash, Zsh, and Fish shells. To enable completions:

# For Bash
bestls completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/bestls

# For Zsh
bestls completion zsh > ~/.zfunc/_bestls
# Then add this to your .zshrc if you haven't already:
# fpath=(~/.zfunc $fpath)

# For Fish
bestls completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/bestls.fish

Examples

# List home directory with size sorting
bestls -p ~ -s size

# Output current directory as pretty JSON
bestls --json-pretty

# List /etc directory sorted by modification date
bestls -p /etc -s date

# Show all files including hidden ones
bestls -a

# List files with full details (permissions, owner, group)
bestls -a -s date

Help

View all available options:

bestls --help

🛠️ Command Line Options

Option	Short	Description
--path	-p	Directory path to list
--sort	-s	Sort by: name, size, date
--all	-a	Show hidden files
--json		Output compact JSON format
--json-pretty		Output pretty formatted JSON
completion		Generate shell completions
--help	-h	Show help information
--version	-V	Show version information

Completion Options

Shell	Description
bash	Generate Bash completions
zsh	Generate Zsh completions
fish	Generate Fish completions

🏗️ Building from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.85.0 or later
• Cargo package manager

Build Steps

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/MurtadaNazar/bestls.git
   cd bestls

2. Build the project:

   cargo build --release

3. (Optional) Install globally:

   cargo install --path .

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

📄 License

This project is licensed under:

• MIT License - See LICENSE for details

👨‍💻 Author

Murtaza Nazar

• Email: mkm9284@gmail.com
• GitHub: @MurtadaNazar

🔗 Links

• Repository
• Issues
• Releases