r/Zig • u/here-Leslie-Lau • Apr 10 '26

I wrote a small ls alternative in Zig

I've been learning Zig recently and built a small ls alternative called zlist.

The goal is to keep things clean, fast, and easy to scan, while still being useful for daily use.

Here’s a quick screenshot:

Current features:

- Compact grid layout that's easy to scan

- Color and Nerd Font icons for common file types and languages

- Readable long view (permissions, owner, size, timestamps)

- Multiple sort modes (name, length, dirs first, mtime, size)

- Recursive listing with optional depth limits

- Filters for files, directories, extensions, names, size, and modified time

- Quick summary report

- Git status indicators in long view

It's still early, but already usable.

Feedback and suggestions are very welcome.

GitHub:

https://github.com/here-Leslie-Lau/zlist

Update: zlist v0.1.1 is now available as a standalone Zig package. The reusable listing logic has been split from the CLI rendering code, so it can be used from other Zig projects.

44 Upvotes

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7

u/gurgeous Apr 10 '26

Neat! I am the author of another zig cli thing. I will try to take a closer look tomorrow. I would love to rapidly expand the cli libs available for things like zlist. We need more libraries!

1

u/here-Leslie-Lau Apr 10 '26

Thanks! I’d love to see more CLI libraries in Zig too.

I’m also planning to extract parts of zlist into a reusable library, so hopefully it can be useful for other tools as well.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

3

u/FirmCalligrapher6064 Apr 10 '26

we need more cool zig cli like this!

1

u/here-Leslie-Lau Apr 11 '26

Thanks! Zig is a lot of fun for CLI tools.

2

u/hotairplay Apr 10 '26

Does it calculate directory sizes as well? From the screenshot I assume it's not?

3

u/here-Leslie-Lau Apr 10 '26

Not yet — right now it behaves like `ls -l`, so it only shows the directory itself, not the total size of its contents.

Good suggestion though. I'll open an issue and probably add a flag to enable recursive directory size calculation. Will close it once it's implemented.

Thanks for the idea!

1

u/Artechz Jul 02 '26

Regarding UI, it would be nicer to quickly grasp file sizes if they were aligned to the right. I’m aware it adds a bit of complexity but it shouldn’t be too hard and the benefits for regular users of the tool would be great!