colorls

A port of the famous ruby colorls tool to Crystal.

Motivation

I found the original colorls to be a pretty neat tool and was interested to start learning Crystal since they released v1.0, so I decided trying to port colorls would be a nice way to:

learn about how colorls works
learn about Crystal and its standard library
figure out some of the pitfalls in translating a work from Ruby to Crystal

Performance

Another motivation is that I've been interested more recently in using high-level compiled languages to write command-line utilities in order to reduce the runtime dependencies. Just starting up a ruby interpreter and loading in some packages can be a pretty expensive task. Since a tool like colorls is designed for interactive use, it seemed like a good fit.

In limited testing on my development machine, I'm seeing a 30-50x speedup. Yay Crystal!

CAVEAT: Please take any anecdotal benchmarks with a grain of salt. Feel free to drop me a line and tell me what you see.

Installation

TODO: Come up with a procedure to install this and then write installation instructions here

Usage

This has only been tested with Crystal 1.0.0 w/ LLVM 10.0. YMMV.

compile with:

shards install
shards build

then:

./bin/colorls
./bin/colorls -l
./bin/colorls -1

Development

Test with

crystal spec

Build with

shards build

TODO / Bugs Fixed, Issues Completed

Wide unicode char support
Printing number-of-hardlinks (thanks @blacksmoke16)
Include Git Support (--gs)
Term-width support (now using term-screen shard)
Port all tests from the Ruby version or build equivalent tests.
All the special encoding features in the Ruby version dont exist here. Maybe unnecessary in Crystal?
Movement of the binary with respect to the /config directory containing the yaml config files may cause issues. (FIXED?)

Known Issues

Clubbing together cmdline options doesn't work. Will need to use another cmdline option parser to make this happen.
Colors do not display the same as the Ruby version because of difference in how x11 colors map to RGB values vs. the 256 color palette.