ls, I love you

Hey everyone,
now I know I have actually very rarely posted anything, and there has been a particular shortage of late, but seeing as I only posted last night to get my visits up a bit, I thought I might try it again considering the staggeringly huge difference, my hits for this whole month went up 7x in one day, than it had in 18 days.
So anyway, upto something serious.
Since I have been using ubuntu a lot recently, I have been using bash a lot. Now I have used this before, as we use it at university, but i never really thought too much about it, as i didnt use it all that much. Now ive got ubuntu on my laptop, and im using it a lot more, and i have come to love something so simple about it, that when i went back to windows (as i had to write an essay, and my printer was already installed to xp) and started to use command prompt, i felt like something had died inside.
What was that amazing, and beautiful little thing that i couldnt live without? well ill give you a hint (apart from the fact that its in the title), its only 2 letters long, though you can add -l to make it similar to dir on windows. Thats right, i love ls.
Its just seems so elegant, plus it takes no effort at all on the keyboard, you can even easily swipe your hand across the keyboard if u cant remember something, and simply touch the keys. Plus the fact it brings a little colour to a terminal. Though that doesnt really matter to me.
Originally when i started to use linux (i had dabbled before, but only really used it at university – and that was still rarely) i didnt really like it all that much. I was so used to dir, the rigidness of it, the straight column effect, telling me whether it was a directory, or not, and everything else.
But since ive started to use ubuntu its all i use, i could create an environment variable to make dir, but why when ls is better, it looks easier to find things, and it seems more fun in a world of rigidity of letters and numbers, which is often known as a DOS, or command prompt. I even prefer the name of the window (bash/terminal), it just seems more fun, and more helpful for the user. Yes linux isnt really for absolute beginners. It can be, and can work very well with a bit of messing about to start off with (if your on a laptop, with a well known distro on a desktop, your good from the word go). I don’t think its just ls, I but that seems to be the main thing I miss, that and the fact you can just use cd to go straight back from where you started, as well as the fact that it seems to store practically every command you have EVER made, which is handy. The CLI is just so much more useful, and has so much more functionality than the windows equivalent. You can easily ssh in unix, you have to go through and install other software in windows. Plus the fact its also a lot more secure and such (p.s. if your just starting to use bash, if you forget to put sudo infront of something, just do sudo !! to go back to the previous command, except with sudo before – trust me, you will use it a LOT). All in all i think the CLI, not just ls is better in linux. There are so many commands missing from windows, that just arent in windows by default when they should be, and it even looks better, with the cool transparent look, which you cannot really get in windows (you can get something similar, but its usually a window you put command into, and it then copies it to command prompt, or it just makes the whole thing transparent).
Anyway, I have now sorted this, and I have installed ls onto windows
This is the tool I used, and it shows up colours, as well as ls perfectly, though I changed colour half way through setting it up, so I don’t currently have multi-coloured links, though I’ll sort that out soon. Just copy the command to C:WINDOWSSystem32, its the easiest way.

By the way, I now have an RSS feed (i did have a much cooler rss pic, but for some reason it just disappeared), as well as much more in the column on the right (–> in case you didnt know), I will be putting more up there, as well as probably putting RSS’s up for my friends list.
I highly recommend you go for the codinghorror RSS as well, its probably my favourite blog about (he just had a baby, and gave him a C++ guide book ftw!!!!!!!). Plus for a budding programmer, stackoverflow is very good, just for lurking about, reading up on things you don’t know.
Anyway, thanks to anyone who is still reading this, and even more so to anyone who has read more than this post (I salute you, sir/madam [pick relevant one])!!!
Byeeeeeeeee

~ by lavamunky on 20/03/2009.