Paths

First pls organises paths supplied as CLI arguments into groups of solo files and individual directories. Then it prints each group one by one.

pls README.md Cargo.toml Cargo.lock src docs

 README.md
 Cargo.toml
 Cargo.lock

src:
  args/
   └─   args.rs
  commands/
   └─   commands.rs
  config/
   └─   config.rs
  enums/
   └─   enums.rs
  ext/
   └─   ext.rs
  fmt/
   └─   fmt.rs
  gfx/
   └─   gfx.rs
  models/
   └─   models.rs
  output/
   └─   output.rs
  pack/
   └─   pack.rs
  traits/
   └─   traits.rs
  utils/
   └─   utils.rs
  vsc/
   └─   vsc.rs
  exc.rs
  main.rs
 .pls.yml

docs:
  node_modules/
  public/
  src/
󰛦  astro.config.ts
󰜎  justfile
  package.json
 .pls.yml
  tsconfig.json

Solo files

The solo files group consists of all files supplied individually. These files are collected into one group. Each of the files in this group comes with its own separate configuration derived from .pls.yml files.

The special thing here is that the group also has its own configuration determined from the common ancestor of all these files. This group-level configuration sets top-level options such as table headings, box-drawing characters and importance scales.

Consider the following filesystem tree:

file_group
├── .pls.yml
├── a
└── subdir
    ├── .pls.yml
    └── b

file_group/.pls.yml
file_group/subdir/.pls.yml

app_const:
  table:
    header_style: red bold underline
entry_const:
  user_styles:
    curr: green bold
    other: green bold
specs:
  - pattern: ^a$
    style: red underline

app_const:
  table:
    header_style: blue
entry_const:
  nlink_styles:
    file_sing: blue
  timestamp_formats:
    mtime: "<bold blue>[year]-[month]-[day]</>"
specs:
  - pattern: ^a$
    style: blue
    icons:
      - file

pls a ./../file_group/./subdir/a

Link# T Permissions User   Group     Size Modified            Name
    1 f rw- r-- r-- runner runner 0.0   B 2026-Jul-11 10:32am   a
    1 f rw- r-- r-- runner runner 0.0   B 2026-07-11            ./../file_group/./subdir/a

Note how both files retain their individual configurations for the row, but the table settings come from the outer .pls.yml file. Also note that the file names are shown exactly as they were passed on the command line.

Symlinks

By default, pls does not follow symlinks in the arguments provided to it. So a symlink to a directory will be treated as a file input and will not list the contents of the target directory.

pls sym

󰌹 sym@ 󰁔 ./dir

pls ./dir

  LICENSE
  README.md