[coldtea]

>followed by random annoyances that remind you you are using inferior, non-GNU utilities:

Well, you can switch to another ls in 10 seconds by "brew install gnutools" or some such.

Not to mention the same arguments could be made for FreeBSD, commercial unices, etc.

Come to think of it, I've been using Unix (including Linux) for 25 years, and never even occured to me to expect "ls my_dir -l" to work.

[mkl]

What do you do if you want to add extra arguments when your cursor's at the end? Navigate back near (not to) the beginning? I usually just put them at the end, as almost every program I've used supports it. I add extra arguments after running commands constantly; after pressing up to get it back, you're at the end.

[coldtea]

>What do you do if you want to add extra arguments when your cursor's at the end? Navigate back near (not to) the beginning?

Yes. In most shells it's trivial to go back by a word (e.g. skip in front of the path with one shortcut).

That said, this happens so rare that it's not even something that ever registered with me as a problem. I know what arguments I want for ls. And if I don't it's usually some bizarro infrequent flag that I have to look up how it's used anyway.

And other programs where it would be actually useful don't allow it anyway (having flags after the "main" argument). Git, for one.

[sangnoir]

> Well, you can switch to another ls in 10 seconds by "brew install gnutools" or some such.

I did - but I never remember to type "gls" instead of "ls" - if I were that mindful, I'd always put in the flags at the start, where the BSD utils expect them. As sibling comment noted, trailing flags usually happens when I run a command and decide to amend the flags by up-arrowing and typing. A typical result is "ls -al my_dir -tr" when I realize I want to sort by mod date, post-facto.

I've been using GNU utils 95% of the time I've used Unix(-like) systems: I expect "ls -al my_dir -tr" to work: it's 2021 - recognizing flags isn't rocket science.