I wonder if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I've never considered, even for a moment, replacing a tool like ls. My first reaction was that it's hubris to think "ls isn't good enough for me, I'll make something better." A bit more reflection has almost convinced me that it's a very good thing that people are always thinking and working on ways to improve things, even something that's taken for granted.
On a tangential note, I learned something new and thought that a few other folks might find this of interest: In the screenshots, we see a file with the name "Licence", which to my American eye looked like a typo. On further investigation I found out that "In British English, Canadian English, Irish English, Australian English, and New Zealand English the noun is spelt licence and the verb is license."[0]
To address your first point. If we can't even question the most basic of our tooling then we'll just inhabit a stasis that may be just a local optimum.
To address your second point. The way I think these licence/license words should go is - think of advice/advise. The verb's got the 's', the noun's got the 'c'. Am I wasting my time in actually caring about shit like that? Probably. But that's how I'm wired.
Also practice/practise - a doctor's practice / practise the piano.
I don't think it's a waste of time, but language is fluid. Sometimes it changes very rapidly and sometimes slowly, but it's never static. Since the US uses a single spelling for both (and most of the world defaults to using US English) my guess is that the distinction will vanish eventually.
I'm slowly learning not to care about these distinctions when it comes to English, as long as the meaning is clear. The closer you look, the fuzzier language becomes - even in the UK or US alone, there are vast differences in the way it's used.
… and advice/advise and prophecy/prophesy. For some reason, only the latter has kept the difference in spelling between the noun and the verb in American English.
I'm not sure about ls. As for this tool all it seems to add is git status, but it's not working for me for some reason (not sure why) so I can't comment on the usefulness of this.
I do think some other coreutils could be replaced. cp for example, doesn't give you a progress bar so if you are copying a very large file it could take 2 minutes or 2 hours. I suppose you could create a wrapper for cp that repeatedly ls-es the destination directory to give you a progress of the copy.
On a tangential note, I learned something new and thought that a few other folks might find this of interest: In the screenshots, we see a file with the name "Licence", which to my American eye looked like a typo. On further investigation I found out that "In British English, Canadian English, Irish English, Australian English, and New Zealand English the noun is spelt licence and the verb is license."[0]
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/licence