[!IMPORTANT]
This is the documentation for the development version of lsd.
Please consult the documentation on the Tags page if you are looking for the documentation of individual releases.
This project is a rewrite of GNU ls with lots of added features like colors, icons, tree-view, more formatting options etc.
The project is heavily inspired by the super colorls project.
[!TIP]
Have a look at the Nerd Font README for help with installing Nerd Fonts
In order for icons to work you need to have a patched font like nerd-font or font-awesome installed on your machine and your terminal needs to be configured to use the patched font of your choosing.
If you intend to install lsd from source you need to have a working Rust toolchain (obviously) on your machine.
The release page includes precompiled binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows for every release. You can also get the latest binary of the main branch from the GitHub action build artifacts (choose the top action and then scroll down to the artifacts section).
Configuring your shell to use lsd instead of ls (optional)
In order to use lsd instead of entering the ls command, you need to create an alias for ls in to your shell configuration file (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc…). The simplest variant of such an alias is:
Terminal window
aliasls='lsd'
The alias above will replace a stock ls command with an lsd command without additional parameters.
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In order to make the customization process easier for you we’ve supplied sample files. These files contain the entries for all the defaults that lsd comes with after installation. You can find the sample files in the [documentation folder]!(./doc)`.
We’ve also supplied a [color reference]!(./doc/colors.md) where we’ve documented the default colors lsd uses in its output. You can also preview there.
In order to tailor lsd to your specific needs you can create any of the following three files and make adjustments as you see fit.
Note that it is not required to have all three of the files present in order for your configuration to be applied. For example, if you [only want to customize the icons]!(#customization-example) then only [icons.yaml]!(./doc/icons-sample.yaml) needs to be present in the [configuration directory]!(#config-file-locations); [config.yaml]!(./doc/config-sample.yaml), and [colors.yaml]!(./doc/colors-sample.yaml) do not have to be present in order for your icon modifications to be applied.
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You can also instruct lsd to look for configuration files in a custom location of your choosing by using the following command: lsd --config-file [YOUR_CUSTOM_PATH]. This is particularly useful when testing a configuration changes before commiting to them.
On non-Windows systems lsd follows the XDG Base Directory Specification, thus lsd will look for configuration files any of the following locations:
$HOME/.config/lsd
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lsd
On most systems these variables are mapped to the same location, which is usually ~/.config/lsd/. If lsd does not detect the location, or if the location exists but does not contain any of the three configuration files, the default configuration will be used instead.
For this example let’s assume you’re already content lsd, but there are a few of the default icons that really bug you and you want to change them to something that suits your needs better. All you have to do is create an icons.yaml file in the [configuration directory]!(#config-file-locations) and configure your custom icon there. Here’s how.
There are 3 kinds of icon overrides available in lsd:
name
filetype
extension
Both nerd font glyphs and Unicode emojis can be used for icons. The final set of icons that lsd will use is a combination of the [default icons]!(./src/theme/icon.rs) with the custom icons you’ve set in the icons.yaml file.
[!NOTE]
Aside from the [icon sample file]!(./doc/icons-sample.yaml), you can also find the default icon set in the source code [here]!(src/theme/icon.rs).
A short example for each type of the icon overrides is shown below.
Zst compression is only supported from Debian 12, Ubuntu 21.10, and upward. Starting from lsd v1.1.0 please use the _xz.deb release instead. See this issue for additional details and manual fixes.
In order to display a custom color scheme lsd reads a system environment variable called LS_COLORS. If your custom color scheme is not working LS_COLORS is most likely missing. Please look at the marked solution in this post, which contains instructions on how to set a custom color scheme on Windows for guidance.
[!IMPORTANT]
Always check if the font you are using is correctly set up! Run the following snippet in your terminal emulator and verify that the output prints a folder icon. If it prints a box, or question mark, or something else, then you might have some issues in how you set up the font or how your terminal emulator renders the font.
Terminal window
echo$'\uf115'
For lsd to be able to display icons the font has to include special font glyphs. If icons are not being displayed it could be the case that your current font does not include such glyphs. Thankfully, you can patch most fonts using NerdFont and add these icons to your current font.
Alternatively, you can also download an already patched version of your favorite font from the NerdFont font download page.
Here is a guide on how to set up fonts on macOS, and on Android.
Why are Icons missing or not rendering correctly using PuTTY/KiTTY on Windows?
First of all, make sure a patched font is available on your local machine and that PuTTY/KiTTY is configured to use that font. If you are not certain what this entails please read the [Prerequisites]!(#prerequisites).
Please note that there are problems for PuTTY/KiTTY displaying 2 character wide icons which may be the case for the font you configured. To ensure only 1 character wide icons are used by your font, please select a font like Hack Regular Nerd Font Complete Mono Windows Compatible (see this issue for further details).
Why is the first character of a folder/file getting trimmed?
[!NOTE]
Workaround for Konsole: edit the config file (or create it if it doesn’t already exist) and paste the following configuration directive into it.
# CAREFUL: use copy-paste because this block contains invisible Unicode characters!
icons:
separator: " ㅤ"
This is a known issue in a few terminal emulators. Try using a different terminal emulator like Alacritty or Kitty and see if these suit your needs.
You might also want to check if your font is responsible for causing this. To verify this, try running lsd with icons disabled and if the first character is still being trimmed, you’ve discovered a bug in lsd. Until the bug is fixed you can use the following command as workaround:
Terminal window
lsd--iconnever--ignore-config
Why are there weird (UTF-8) characters in the output?
lsd will always attempt to display the UTF-8 characters in file name, but a U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER(�) is used to represent the invalid UTF-8 characters. If you are seeing this in your lsd output your filename contains an invalid UTF-8 character.
Nerd Fonts is moving the code points of the Material Design Icons in version 3.0, so starting from #830 lsd is using an updated the icon set. If your icons look weird, use fonts that have been patched using Nerd Fonts v2.3.0 or later.
