After watching this video, I’m tempted to give it a try myself. The idea of swapping out traditional CLI tools for Rust-based alternatives is intriguing, and I’m curious to know if anyone has undertaken such an endeavor.
I’m also on the lookout for dotfiles that primarily feature configurations for Rust tools. I find it both educational and entertaining to explore other people’s configurations. I stumbled upon this repository, but I’m interested in discovering more if possible.
Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren’t aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are
mkdir,ln, andrsync.Probably some others I’m forgetting
I have a strong bias for staying with tools that are installed by default. After this many years working with new systems of my own, containers, and systems where I’m not root, the added value of an alternativehas to be quite high for me to switch a core utility.
Thay said, I’ve found fd, ripgrep, and helix to meet that criteria. The others, not so much; they either don’t improve upon or add functionality that’s not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.
git-delta is an exception where the syntax highlighting can make a functional difference in code diffs. Not so much that I think about installing it, or using it outside of indirect VCS configuration, but it is a good example of using style for more than just eye candy. I prefer difftastic, but they do much the same.
While it’s not a replacement for an existing tool and isn’t in your list, nnn is very helpful in many cases, especially bulk renames and reorganizations.
The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don’t lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn’t have them, I’m a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.
The principle exception to this is actually
fd- I now findfind(har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that’s becausefdis so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.I unfortunately do not have your crystaline perfect recall. I used vi/m for nearly 20 years before drifting onto kakoune and now helix; I’ve been using them for about a year, and it’s getting harder and harder to not make reflexive mistakes when I’m trying to use vim. sed was already odd with regex escaping (parens but not brackets? Why??), and I know the less I use it the more I’ll forget. This is crippling when I have to work on a system that doesn’t have these new tools installed.
What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don’t mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like
alias ls="eza"is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I’m on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I’m forced to use the basic ones, I’m actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?
I mean, for helix/vi it’s even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I’m going to be crippled anyway, so…
Nice, I use almost all these! helix, btm, exa, and delta are wonderful.
Maybe sure to replace exa with eza. Exa has been unmaintained for a while and eza is the maintained replacement.
Ah hadn’t realized. Looks like arch AUR was smart about it and yanked exa, and eza had an automatic alias to it.
Please give a try for btop - not Rust based, but pretty good and seem to be superior to btm.
I don’t have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it’s set up, being able to install through
cargorather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don’t have sudo.Btop does look cool though
I like most of those, but helix just sucks. It will never replace vi/vim/nvim. I don’t like zellij either, it’s not a proper replacement for tmux.
You are of course welcome to your opinion. Use whatever tools bring you joy. But I’m a huge fan of helix, and think zellij is great (though I prefer wezterm’s mux server when I can use it).