rustfmt VS vscode-rust

Compare rustfmt vs vscode-rust and see what are their differences.

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rustfmt vscode-rust
61 -
6,414 486
0.3% -
8.9 0.0
2 months ago -
Rust TypeScript
Apache License 2.0 -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rustfmt

Posts with mentions or reviews of rustfmt. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-08-21.
  • Uv format: Code Formatting Comes to uv (experimentally)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Aug 2025
    If you want to call ruff directly, this doesn't change anything. It's a purely optional feature.

    However, to answer the question generally: people want this for the same reason that most people call `cargo fmt` instead of running rustfmt[1] directly: it's a better developer experience, particularly if you don't already think of code formatting as an XY-type problem ("I want to format my code, and now I have to discover a formatter" versus "I want to format my code, and my tool already has that").

    [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt

  • Why We Chose Rust For Spin
    8 projects | dev.to | 27 Jun 2025
    cargo, rustfmt, clippy, rust-analyzer, and Rust’s robust unit testing capabilities together form a powerful ecosystem for managing large-scale projects like Spin.
  • Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025
    > I assumed those would be in,

    A new edition doesn't mean features are automatically stabilized.

    I agree with these two specifically, it would be great to have them in stable. They're not yet though: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/5083

  • Automated Testing and Dev Containers
    7 projects | dev.to | 15 Nov 2024
    Firstly, I added a section to run the code formatter rustfmt and the linter clippy:
  • You can't do that because I hate you
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

    With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

    wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

    --no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

    Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

    You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

    Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

    [0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

    [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

    [2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

  • Let else will finally be formatted by rustfmt soon
    5 projects | /r/rust | 3 Jul 2023
    The new style still supports single line let-else, and there is a configuration parameter to make it be on one line also for longer lines.
  • Is rustfmt abandoned? Will it ever format `let ... else` syntax?
    11 projects | /r/rust | 3 Jun 2023
    It seems there is an issue about this dating all the way back from 2018 but yet it still hasn't been fixed.
  • Hey Rustaceans! Got a question? Ask here (22/2023)!
    10 projects | /r/rust | 29 May 2023
    However since 4179 recent versions should merge configuration files. Not sure what the details / specifics are but if just ignoring the file entirely is not good enough you might give it its own directory and rustfmt.toml file and see if that works.
  • Rustfmt refusing to work with certain functions.
    1 project | /r/rust | 26 Apr 2023
    Could this be be #3863 - Gives up on chains if any line is too long? It might not be, because I can't see a specific "line" that's too long to format, but there's more detail about the exact problem in the issue.
  • Rust Tips and Tricks #PartOne
    3 projects | dev.to | 8 Apr 2023
    Rustfmt is a tool that formats Rust code in compliance with style guidelines. Its name precisely reflects its purpose. To install rustfmt, you can run rustup component add rustfmt. Once installed, you can execute cargo fmt to format Rust code in your workspace. If you require further information, you can visit rustfmt’s GitHub repository.

vscode-rust

Posts with mentions or reviews of vscode-rust. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects.

We haven't tracked posts mentioning vscode-rust yet.
Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rustfmt and vscode-rust you can also consider the following projects:

Clippy - A bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code. Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/

Rust for Visual Studio Code

rust-analyzer - A Rust compiler front-end for IDEs [Moved to: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer]

Helix - Native Ruby extensions without fear

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Sevalla is the PaaS you have been looking for! Advanced deployment pipelines, usage-based pricing, preview apps, templates, human support by developers, and much more!
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InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
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Did you know that Rust is
the 5th most popular programming language
based on number of references?