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Honest question...why?
Some have better ux, some support more platforms out of the box. I don't find it a good idea trying to replace everything though.
I only tend to replace if all of those are met:
- there are neat additional features or a performance gain that's noticeable in regular use
- there is some maintenance history
- It doesn't completely break my workflow.
So far, only things I've actually replaced are aliasing ls to exa/eza, and switched to ripgrep for most of my uses of grep.
If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?
Battle hardened > new
Unless the new has a killer feature set worth the trade off in potential bugs
Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren't aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.
- cd: zoxide
- ls: eza
- cat: bat
- grep: ripgrep
- find: fd
- sed: sd
- du: dust
- top/htop: btm
- vi: helix
- tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
- diff: delta
- ps: procs
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.
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.
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 find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that's because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.
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.
Like many others, I don't replace old tools with new ones, simply because it is written in Rust. For example, fzf is a very novel and useful tool that's written in Go. (FYI: Fzf has a Rust alternative called skim). I'm going to restrict the rest of the post to the context of this thread - Rust CLI/TUI programs that I like. But by no means are they the only new ones I like, or always a replacement for the old ones.
fd and ripgrep (rg) have 2 things in common that give them edge over their older counterparts. First is that both are extremely fast compared to their predecessors. Second is that both support a modern (perl-compatible) version of regex syntax that many programming languages support.
Zellij is a terminal multiplexer like Tmux. However, Zellij IMO has one huge advantage over Tmux and screen - you don't need to take a tutorial or read a user guide just to get started. Everything is discoverable and intuitive. Zellij has the potential to replace TMux as the dominant terminal multiplexer in the near future.
You may find zoxide, atuin and starship as good extensions to your terminal experience, depending on your tastes. Zoxide is a smart directory changer (alt for cd) with good integration all around - with a lot of shells, alternatives (data import), editors (emacs, nvim, etc), file browsers (ranger, nnn, etc) and even mail client (aerc). Atuin replaces the history part of GNU Readline. But lately, it has started gaining features not found in readline, like encrypted history and cross-device history sync. Starship may be a bit fancy for shell prompts - but I find its configuration format to be simpler than the old method. It also supports several shells giving you a uniform experience across shells.
GPG-TUI is a TUI frontend to GnuPG. It's useful simply because the GnuPG UI is terrible. Meanwhile, Sequoia PGP is a tool that aims to replace GnuPG altogether. It has some lofty ambitions and has forced the OpenPGP ecosystem to advance a bit. Some of their innovations aim to solve the drawbacks of old OpenPGP - like lack of PKI (instead of just WoT) and Perfect forward secrecy in certain modes. Its defaults are also more sane and modern compared to GnuPG.
Git-UI (Rust) and LazyGit (Go) are TUI frontends for Git - they have no alternatives. I can recommend either of them if you are a heavy user of git - especially interactive staging and interactive rebasing. Meanwhile, git-interactive-rebase-tool is a tool specifically designed to manage interactive rebases.
If you are into coding, you may find Tokei useful. It is tool for counting Lines of code (LoC) in your projects, segregated by language. Hyperfine, from the developer of fd, is used to benchmark applications over several runs, with a lot of configuration options. Bat is a terminal pager, again from the developer of fd. It supports syntax highlighting. I often find uses for that. I'm not aware of another tool with the exact same functionality.
Finally, nushell is showing a lot of promise as a shell with more modern features. It extends the structured data paradigm from powershell.
Forgot to mention stacked-git (stg). This is a tool to deal with patch stacks - much like the age old quilt tool often used by kernel hackers. Unlike quilt, stg uses git to manage a stack of patches. This tool was originally written in Python. It was recently rewritten in Rust by the same team.
Having used stg, it's like having multiple staging indexes in git. This allows you to craft a good commit history like the one you get from using interactive rebasing. Unlike interactive rebasing, you don't have to wait till finishing the feature, in order to achieve that result. If you are a git user and haven't given stg a try yet, I strongly recommend you do. It's a nice tool to have in your development tool chest.
Note that skim performs worse than fzf. There's a new matcher in Rust called nucleo which is faster, but it currently doesn't have a cli and can only be used inside Helix editor (hx)
nu is probably the best shell for ad-hoc data processing, handling all my daily needs in one expression.
fd and rg have another thing in common, that they're both 50% shorter than their traditional alternatives /s
Thanks for your comprehensive comment!
I've not replaced anything just because it's Rust, but I have replaced a fair share of tools, just because their newer Rust equivalents are much better
What for? Even if they have improvements in some areas, the original POSIX standard utilities will continue to be needed for script compatibility. You're not going to swap them out - at best you can add them and then you just have an additional code base to support with additional attack surface to protect.
The uutils project is aiming for full compatibility though, so eventually you will be able to just swap them out.
I don't know man, those tools - they seem rusty to me.
The thread needed the joke. Had you not done it, I'd have offered some flavor of it. Bravo!
No. Those tools are tried and well tested. Yes there may still be bugs lurking but simply rewriting in Rust does not guarantee safety. I do hope that this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html doesn't get used in that repo.
That said, I'll take a look in say five years and see how they are getting on.
I’m really looking forward to using something like rust coreutils, but only once the testing passes the gnu test suite (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking)
Sounds dumb. Like when Java was supposed to be able to do everything, but this is faster. Doesn't make it not dumb.
I wouldn't necessarily call it dumb.
Rust is much more of a drop in replacement for C/C++ than Java ever was, and it carries some serious benefits over C/C++ like proper memory management and a modern library and packaging system.
Rebasing to Rust might genuinely be a good idea for some of these tools.
What alternatives? Most of them do different things, often optimized for interactive usecase but lacking in scriptability.
And just because it's in Rust, doesn't mean it's better in code quality or even safer.
I do like fd though.
nushell, since it uses more structured data, is basically moving in this direction.
I am using alacritty for years, just recently discovered helix. So I guess I am a natural convert.
No, but I'd gladly do so if it shows a considerable performance improvement compared to their "standard" counterparts.