lx — file Lister eXtended

lx is a modern file lister for Unix — a replacement for the standard ls command.

But… lx is a file lister with personality! 🌟

Upgrading from an earlier 0.x release? See docs/UPGRADING.md for breaking changes per release, with migration notes and the reasoning behind each change.

Highlights

🌟 Personalities

Shell aliases have been wrapping ls in user-preferred flags for forty years. lx takes the idea and promotes it into a feature: a personality is a named bundle of settings, activated by the name you call lx under. Symlink lx to ll and ll behaves like a long-view lx. Create symlinks named la, tree or du — it Just Works, no shell aliases required.

ln -s $(which lx) ~/.local/bin/ll     # ll is now "lx long view"
ln -s $(which lx) ~/.local/bin/tree   # tree is now "lx tree view"

Same data, three personalities, three completely different views. No aliases.

Personalities can inherit from each other, pick formats and themes, bundle filter rules, and activate conditionally based on environment variables (different behaviour inside SSH, in a specific terminal, on a particular host, …).

lx ships with compiled-in personalities so it works the way you'd expect out of the box — and you can override or extend any of them from your config file.

A CLI you can predict

lx's flag surface is designed to be orthogonal. Every long view column has the same three things: a flag to add it, a --no-* counterpart to hide it, and a sort key to sort on that column. Learn a flag once, and you can guess the rest:

lx -l --inode         # add the inode column to long view
lx -l -i              # - same thing; short flag
lx -l --no-inode      # remove it (even if the current format includes it)
lx -l --no-i          # - same thing; short flag
lx -l -s inode        # sort by it (without having to show the column)

Short flags aim to be guessable mnemonics — -u for --user, -g for --group, -m for --modified.

Related actions share a letter in different cases: -b and -B modify the file size column to show raw byte counts or Binary size prefixes, respectively. -d (list directories as files) pairs with -D (list only directories).

View detail compounds: -l fulfils its historical role of showing more detail in a "long" view, but using it multiple times (-ll / -lll) increases the amount of detail shown. Similarly -t, -tt and -ttt show progressively more timestamp fields.

CLI flags are divided into four disjoint classes that stay out of each other's way.

Zero config, or every detail

Out of the box: no config file needed. The compiled-in defaults use only the 8/256-colour ANSI palette, so a fresh lx looks the same on a twenty-year-old serial console as it does on a modern Ghostty — identical columns, identical layout, sensible colours. And it works on a light or dark background.

lx --init-config generates a config file that documents the defaults without altering them, so you can go from zero-config to fully-tuned without ever crossing a behavioural discontinuity.

When you want more: lx may be the most flexibly configurable ls-like around. You've already seen personalities as symlinks; they come alive inside lx's config file, where they're just one of five kinds of composable section. The others — formats, themes, styles, and file-type classes — have their own inheritance or pattern-matching rules, and everything combines freely:

[theme.work]                    # a theme…
inherits = "catppuccin-mocha"   # …based on a curated preset
use-style = "dev"               # …with its own file-name styling

[style.dev]
class.source = "#ff8700"        # every source file in orange
"Makefile"   = "bold yellow"    # this exact filename in bold yellow

[personality.work]              # a personality using the theme
inherits = "ll"                 # …based on a builtin personality
theme = "work"

[[personality.work.when]]       # conditional: only inside SSH
env.SSH_CONNECTION = true
colour = "never"                # …disable all colour

Sounds and looks too complicated? Ignore it! lx offers powerful features from the get-go, with no configuration. The complexity hides until you need it.

There's more:

• A suite of flags (--show-config and --dump-*) lets you inspect and troubleshoot your configuration.
• lx --upgrade-config migrates schemas between releases automatically.
• lx ships with curated example themes which you can drop in a conf.d directory.

Version control integration

lx has built-in backends for both Git and Jujutsu, with VCS auto-detection. Per-file status optionally appears in long views, and you can choose to exclude files matched on repository ignore rules.

The jj backend is opt-in at compile time to keep the default binary small — Homebrew and pre-built release binaries include it.

Fast, even on slow filesystems

A big tree shouldn't make lx feel sluggish. When computing recursive sizes, lx walks each directory once. An in-memory cache catches cases where the same directory would otherwise be visited repeatedly.

lx -lTZ ~/Projects    # long + tree + total size, in one pass

On high-latency filesystems like NFS, where every extra stat() round-trip costs real milliseconds, lx 0.9 lists large trees in roughly a tenth of the wall time earlier lx releases took.

lx 0.10 keeps that NFS work and adds a second round of traversal-engine improvements aimed at deep local trees: lazy metadata, a smarter xattr strategy, and other optimisations make deep tree traversal 2–7× faster than it was in 0.9.

A fine manual

For a more in-depth walkthrough of everything above, see the user guide!

But you don't need to! lx works exactly as you'd expect a good CLI citizen to. If you get stuck there's --help and man pages.

Installation

Homebrew (macOS and Linux)

brew tap wjv/tap
brew install lx

Installs the lx binary (with jj support), man pages, and shell completions.

From crates.io

cargo install lx-ls                # git support only
cargo install lx-ls --features jj  # + jj support

The crate is published as lx-ls on crates.io. The installed binary is still called lx.

Pre-built binaries and man pages

Download from the GitHub releases page for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux (x86_64 and aarch64). All release binaries include jj support.

Put both man pages in your man path, or view with man <file>.

Build from source

lx requires Rust 1.94 or later.

git clone https://github.com/wjv/lx
cd lx
cargo build --release --features jj   # binary in target/release/lx

If you have just, the included Justfile automates installation, man pages, personality symlinks, and completions — run just -l to see the recipes.

Documentation

• docs/GUIDE.md — the user guide: personalities, configuration, themes, VCS, daily usage, shell completions.
• docs/UPGRADING.md — breaking changes per release, with migration notes and justifications.
• man lx — command reference (installed alongside the binary; mdoc source in man/lx.1).
• man lxconfig.toml — configuration file reference (mdoc source in man/lxconfig.toml.5).
• CHANGELOG.md — release notes.
• lx --help — online flag reference.

Known limitations

• jj support is opt-in at compile time. Release binaries (Homebrew, GitHub releases) include it; cargo install defaults to git-only. Build with --features jj to enable.
• Old config files can be migrated to the current schema with lx --upgrade-config (a .bak of the original is saved automatically). Files written for older 0.x releases load unchanged where possible; the migration only kicks in for the oldest formats or where new sections are being injected.
• The crate name on crates.io is lx-ls; the binary is still lx.
• lx is an experiment under active development. The CLI surface is not yet stable.

Acknowledgements

lx stands on the shoulders of giants.

It is built on the foundations of exa by Benjamin Sago (ogham). The core file system, output rendering, and column system are all based on his work, and that of his contributors. Thank you! 🌟

Several features were inspired by eza, the active community fork of exa maintained by Christina Sørensen and collaborators. These were reimplemented from scratch for lx and sometimes differ from their eza counterparts.

Licence

MIT — same as the original exa. See LICENCE.

Pronunciation

lx is pronounced "alex". Or "ell-ex". Really, you choose.