Perhaps it's still too new, but 'exa' doesn't seem quite the tool for me.

Firstly I couldn't find out what the colours and underlines actually mean. Secondly I find that I need to change the screen background colour and font to be able to read the coloured text. Admittedly, this might be my eyes, but if a filename is basically a blur I don't get a lot from the feature! (I have similar problems with other commands that generate coloured output, so I don't blame 'exa'.)

Potentially the Git interface is useful, though I don't know what the symbols mean. The whole thing needs documentation - ideally in the form of a well-structured manpage. Also I was puzzled to find that:

exa -l --git db_*

didn't show the Git details for the matching files. These are only shown when there's no file argument.

My final nit-pick is that my favourite 'ls -ltr' can't be written so simply in 'exa'. The equivalent seems to be:

exa -ls modified

I'd like to see a way of setting defaults (like sort by modification time), through an environment variable or a configuration file. As Jon says, using aliases would also be a solution.

I shall be intrigued to see how 'exa' develops. It does have promise. Thanks for alerting me to it @clacke.