Rust Easy! Modern Cross-platform Command Line Tools to Supercharge Your Terminal

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • alacritty

    A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

  • Let us start with the terminal itself. Alacritty is a cross-platform modern terminal emulator with sensible defaults. It is GPU accelerated, super fast, and highly configurable. You can use it on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It doesn't have much in terms of a UI, and hence all configurations are done through YAML files. I don't use it as my primary terminal as I love Yakuake too much for all its cool features. We can get most of those features (tabs, split panes, dropdown mode) using tmux and tdrop if really needed. I use Alacrity when I need speed and GPU acceleration. There is an excellent tutorial on using Alacritty with tmux.

  • starship

    ☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

  • Starship is the best terminal prompt I have ever used. Forget Oh My Zsh and stuff like that. Starship is fast, highly customizable, and has a great default theme and settings. I didn't even change most of the default settings, as things were perfect as it is. Starship works on shells like zsh, fish, and bash and can also work alongside other prompts like Oh My Zsh, in case you still want to use Oh My Zsh for other plugins like autosuggestions and so on. Starship works best with a Nerd Font as it can show icons and ligatures based on context. I used Oh My Zsh for many years with the powerlevel10k theme, but the prompt was a bit slow. Starship is blazing fast with more features and an excellent UX.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • tdrop

    A Glorified WM-Independent Dropdown Creator

  • Let us start with the terminal itself. Alacritty is a cross-platform modern terminal emulator with sensible defaults. It is GPU accelerated, super fast, and highly configurable. You can use it on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It doesn't have much in terms of a UI, and hence all configurations are done through YAML files. I don't use it as my primary terminal as I love Yakuake too much for all its cool features. We can get most of those features (tabs, split panes, dropdown mode) using tmux and tdrop if really needed. I use Alacrity when I need speed and GPU acceleration. There is an excellent tutorial on using Alacritty with tmux.

  • ohmyzsh

    🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,300+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

  • Starship is the best terminal prompt I have ever used. Forget Oh My Zsh and stuff like that. Starship is fast, highly customizable, and has a great default theme and settings. I didn't even change most of the default settings, as things were perfect as it is. Starship works on shells like zsh, fish, and bash and can also work alongside other prompts like Oh My Zsh, in case you still want to use Oh My Zsh for other plugins like autosuggestions and so on. Starship works best with a Nerd Font as it can show icons and ligatures based on context. I used Oh My Zsh for many years with the powerlevel10k theme, but the prompt was a bit slow. Starship is blazing fast with more features and an excellent UX.

  • powerlevel10k

    A Zsh theme

  • Starship is the best terminal prompt I have ever used. Forget Oh My Zsh and stuff like that. Starship is fast, highly customizable, and has a great default theme and settings. I didn't even change most of the default settings, as things were perfect as it is. Starship works on shells like zsh, fish, and bash and can also work alongside other prompts like Oh My Zsh, in case you still want to use Oh My Zsh for other plugins like autosuggestions and so on. Starship works best with a Nerd Font as it can show icons and ligatures based on context. I used Oh My Zsh for many years with the powerlevel10k theme, but the prompt was a bit slow. Starship is blazing fast with more features and an excellent UX.

  • bat

    A cat(1) clone with wings.

  • bat is one of my favorite tools from this list. It's a replacement for cat, and once you have used bat, you will never go back. It provides features like syntax highlight, line numbers, Git change highlight, shows special chars, paging, and so on. It is super fast and looks beautiful. I have aliased cat to bat immediately after trying it for the first time. By default, bat behaves similarly to less by paging large output, but that can be disabled to make it work precisely like cat. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for cat even in scripts. bat can also be used as a previewer for fzf. It can also be combined with many other commands and tools like tail, man, and git, among others, to add syntax highlighting to outputs. Syntax highlighting themes are configurable.

  • Cargo

    The Rust package manager

  • These tools are available for both Linux and macOS. I have not tested them on Windows, but most should also work on Windows. I recommend aliasing the commands to replace the standard commands based on your preferences. If you have Cargo, the rust package manager, you can install all these using Cargo.

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  • fzf

    :cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder

  • bat is one of my favorite tools from this list. It's a replacement for cat, and once you have used bat, you will never go back. It provides features like syntax highlight, line numbers, Git change highlight, shows special chars, paging, and so on. It is super fast and looks beautiful. I have aliased cat to bat immediately after trying it for the first time. By default, bat behaves similarly to less by paging large output, but that can be disabled to make it work precisely like cat. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for cat even in scripts. bat can also be used as a previewer for fzf. It can also be combined with many other commands and tools like tail, man, and git, among others, to add syntax highlighting to outputs. Syntax highlighting themes are configurable.

  • lsd

    The next gen ls command

  • Both LSD and exa are replacements for the ls command. They both look gorgeous with nice colors and icons and have features like headers, sorting, tree views, and so on. Exa is a bit faster than LSD for tree views and can show the Git status of files and folders. I prefer exa due to the Git support and faster tree views. I have set up my ls alias to use exa by default. Both can be configured to show custom columns and sorting behaviors.

  • exa

    A modern replacement for ‘ls’.

  • Both LSD and exa are replacements for the ls command. They both look gorgeous with nice colors and icons and have features like headers, sorting, tree views, and so on. Exa is a bit faster than LSD for tree views and can show the Git status of files and folders. I prefer exa due to the Git support and faster tree views. I have set up my ls alias to use exa by default. Both can be configured to show custom columns and sorting behaviors.

  • rip

    A safe and ergonomic alternative to rm (by nivekuil)

  • rip is an improved version of the rm command. It is faster, safer, and user-friendly. rip sends deleted files to a temp location so they can be recovered using rip -u. I really like the simplicity and the revert feature, as I don't have to worry about accidentally deleting something using rm. While rip can be aliased to replace rm, the creators advise not doing that as you might get used to it and do rm on other systems where you cannot revert the delete.

  • xcp

    An extended `cp` (by tarka)

  • xcp is a partial clone of the cp command. It is faster and more user-friendly with progress bars, parallel copying, .gitignore support, and so on. I like its simplicity and developer experience, especially the progress bars. I have aliased cp to xcp so I can use it everywhere.

  • zoxide

    A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells.

  • zoxide is a smarter cd replacement. It remembers the directories you visit, and you can jump to them without providing a full path. You can provide partial paths or even a word from the path. When there are similar paths, zoxide offers an interactive selection using fzf. It is super fast and works with all major shells. I like how it works, and I have aliased cd to z so I can use it everywhere.

  • dust

    A more intuitive version of du in rust

  • # Arch Linux yay -S dust # Fedora/CentOS # Install binary from https://github.com/bootandy/dust/releases # Debian/Ubuntu deb-get install du-dust # macOS Homebrew brew install dust # macOS MacPorts port install dust # Windows Scoop scoop install dust # Cargo cargo install du-dust

  • ripgrep

    ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

  • ripgrep (rg) is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches your current directory for a regex pattern. It is faster than grep and has many features like compressed files search, colorized output, smart case, file type filtering, multi-threading, and so on. It understands .gitignore files and skips hidden and ignored files. Here is a feature comparison with other similar tools, and yes, it is faster than all the other tools in the list.

  • fd

    A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

  • fd is a simpler alternative to find. It is more intuitive to use and comes with sensible defaults. It is extremely fast due to parallel traversing and shows a modern colorized output and supports patterns and regex, parallel commands, smart case, understands .gitignore files, and so on. I have aliased find to fd as I could never remember what options to pass to get a basic find command working.

  • sd

    Intuitive find & replace CLI (sed alternative)

  • sd is a find-and-replace CLI, and you can use it as a replacement for sed and awk. It is way more user-friendly and modern. It is also magnitudes faster than sed.

  • procs

    A modern replacement for ps written in Rust

  • procs is a ps replacement. It provides colorized human-readable output, multi-column search, more information than ps, docker support, paging, watch mode, and tree view. It is a much more user-friendly and modern alternative to ps. You can filter by name and PID and use logical and/or operators to combine multiple filters. It also has a tree view which is very useful for seeing the process hierarchy. It can also show docker container names for the process running docker containers.

  • bottom

    Yet another cross-platform graphical process/system monitor.

  • bottom is a top replacement with a nice terminal UI. It's quite feature-rich and customizable.

  • topgrade

    Upgrade all the things (by topgrade-rs)

  • Topgrade is a fantastic utility if you prefer to keep your system up-to-date, like me. It detects most of the package managers on your system and triggers updates. It is configurable, so you can configure it to ignore certain package managers. On my system, it detected pacman, SDKMAN, Flatpak, snap, Homebrew, rustup, Linux firmware, Pip, and so on. Topgrade is cross-platform; you can use it on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

  • broot

    A new way to see and navigate directory trees : https://dystroy.org/broot

  • Broot is a tree alternative with a better user experience, and you can use it to navigate a file structure. It's fast and respects .gitignore. You can cd into a directory from the tree view, open sub-directories in a panel, and even preview files. It has excellent keyboard navigation as well. It has many more features.

  • tokei

    Count your code, quickly.

  • Tokei is a nice utility to count lines and stats of code. It is very fast, accurate, and has a nice output. It supports over 150 languages and can output in JSON, YAML, CBOR, and human-readable tables.

  • kdash

    A simple and fast dashboard for Kubernetes

  • kdash: A fast and simple dashboard for Kubernetes. Its created by me :)

  • ht

    Friendly and fast tool for sending HTTP requests

  • xh: A HTTPie alternative with better performance.

  • monolith

    ⬛️ CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file

  • monolith: Convert any webpage into a single HTML file with all assets inlined.

  • ripsecrets

    A command-line tool to prevent committing secret keys into your source code

  • ripsecrets: Find secret keys in your code before committing them to git.

  • eva

    a calculator REPL, similar to bc(1)

  • eva: A CLI REPL calculator.

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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