Rust-Powered Command Line Tools

This video discusses 30 Rust-powered command-line tools that replace or augment standard Unix tools. It covers tools that replace core utilities, shells, grep, find, cat, ls, cd, HTTP clients, terminal multiplexers, Git UIs, disk usage analyzers, file managers, benchmarking tools, text editors, Rust development tools, information lookup tools, code counters, command runners, process runners, and presentation tools. The video also includes honorable mentions and a call to support the creator through Patreon, Discord, and other projects.

Out with the Old #

• Uutils: Replacement for GNU core utilities. Available for various OS and integrated with package managers like NixOS.
• Fish: Rust-rewritten shell with interactive features like syntax highlighting, true color, history-based suggestions, and web-based configuration.
• Ripgrep: Fast grep replacement with smart defaults and gitignore integration.
• FD: Fast and user-friendly replacement for find with colored output.
• Bat: Syntax-highlighting pager for files, falling back to plain text for non-interactive use. Safe to alias cat to.
• Ela: Modern replacement for ls with colors and git status integration. A fork of exa.
• Zoxide: Smarter cd command that navigates to previous directories based on relative paths and usage frequency.
• XH: User-friendly and fast HTTP client with pretty-printed output, a Rust rewrite of the Python HTTP tool.
• Zellij: Terminal workspace and multiplexer with good defaults, UI, and plugin community, replacing tmux or screen.
• GitUI: Fast terminal UI for Git, useful for small operations, similar to lazygit.
• DU Dust: Graphical disk analyzer with a pretty UI and significantly faster performance than standard du.
• Duer: Another fast, graphical, and interactive disk usage analyzer.

In with the New #

• Starship: Fast and customizable shell prompt for any shell. Performance allows it to do things not possible in slower languages.
• Yazi: Command-line file manager with features like backgrounding operations, vim bindings, and file preview.
• Hyperfine: Benchmarking tool built with statistical considerations, running commands multiple times to reduce variance.
• Evil Helix: A fork of the Helix text editor that restores standard Vim keyboard bindings, while keeping features like built-in LSP, tree-sitter, fuzzy finder, and themes.
• Bacon: Watches files for changes and reruns specified cargo commands (e.g., test, clippy). Complements editor LSP output.
• Cargo Info: Command-line tool to get descriptions and metadata for Rust crates, avoiding the need to open a web browser.
• S-select: Finds files using SQL-like queries, helpful for complex find operations.
• Ncspot: ncurses-based Spotify client written in Rust, significantly less memory-intensive than the official client.
• Rusty Man: Command-line viewer for Rust documentation (standard library and installed crates), working offline.
• Delta: Syntax-highlighting pager primarily for git diff, also usable for regular interactive diffs.
• RGA: Wraps ripgrep to search inside container files like zips, highlighting results and showing line context.
• Toki: Recursively counts lines of code in a project by language, useful for READMEs.
• WikiTUI: Simple text user interface for Wikipedia, avoiding the web browser.
• Just: A sane, modern make replacement with detailed error messages and fewer idiosyncrasies. Simple projects can use interchangeably with make.
• Mask: Command runner using a standard markdown file as configuration, allowing documentation to serve as code. Preferred command runner for the creator.
• Mprocs: Tool for running and monitoring multiple long-running processes, useful for development setups (databases, web servers, etc.).
• Present Term: Tool for creating and presenting slides from markdown files, supporting images, varied font sizes, mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX typesetting. Supports Kitty image protocol and Sixel.

Honorable Mentions #

• Several other cool CLI tools that didn't fit into the video.

Summary #

The video presents a comprehensive list of 30 Rust-powered command-line tools that can replace or enhance existing tools, offering benefits like speed, better UI, and additional features. It categorizes these tools into replacements for common utilities and new, beneficial tools. The creator also promotes their other projects and ways viewers can support the channel.