A linemode which mirrors the 'ls' command's long listing format

[onelittlehope]

Some file management tasks require the ability to see at a glance what the file/folder permissions, ownership, size and modified date stamps are. Basically the equivalent of doing a ls -la command in a terminal.

I wanted to see similar information in yazi and so I created a linemode which does so.

File: ~/.config/yazi/yazi.toml

-- ~/.config/yazi/yazi.toml
[mgr]
show_hidden = true
show_symlink = true
linemode = "ls_equivalent"

File: ~/.config/yazi/init.lua

-- ~/.config/yazi/init.lua

-- Display information associated with the file/folder to mirror the output
-- of the 'ls -l' command. i.e. permissions, hardlinks, owner, size, mtime
function Linemode:ls_equivalent()

  local permissions = self._file.cha:perm() or ""

  local nlink = self._file.cha.nlink or ""

  local user = ya.user_name and ya.user_name(self._file.cha.uid) or self._file.cha.uid
  local group = ya.group_name and ya.group_name(self._file.cha.gid) or self._file.cha.gid
  local owner = string.format("%s:%s", user, group)

  local mtime = math.floor(self._file.cha.mtime or 0)
  if mtime == 0 then
    mtime = ""
  elseif os.date("%Y", mtime) == os.date("%Y") then
    mtime = os.date("%b %d %H:%M", mtime)
  else
    mtime = os.date("%b %d  %Y", mtime)
  end

  local size = self._file:size()
  if size then
    size = ya.readable_size(size) or "-"
  else
    local folder = cx.active:history(self._file.url)
    size = folder and tostring(#folder.files) or ""
  end

  return string.format("%s %s %s %6s %s", permissions, nlink, owner, size, mtime)
end

What it looks like:

Notes:

• The user/group strings are not clipped and so if the strings are long it can easily look messy on screen. This is true for the output of ls -la as well.

• I was wondering if there was someway to move the preview panel to be below the middle panel as that would be more efficient use of space for some people's workflows.

• I also saw a discrepancy between the hard link counts that yazi / displays and that ls -la / displays. For example, on my system, ls -la / shows a hard link count of 309, whilst yazi / shows a hard link count of 306.

• I wish the spot information pop up displays a lot more details about the file/folder. e.g. this is what the Midnight Commander file manager displays in its Information view (the left panel) regarding the file selected in the right panel.