Rust Replacements for common CLI Tools

Why would you want to replace these utils in the first place? Some of them are outdated in the sense they were designed for an older area and not modified to the current age accordingly (e.g. using multiple threads etc.). This is also only a short list, there are a ton of other tools that are also amazing, but these are the ones I think are at least a good start.

Well honestly a lot of terminals nowadays are written in rust, but my favorite so far is Alacritty, it’s GPU accelerated. I don’t know what to compare this to … ig most modern terminal emulators are actually quite good, so just use whatever feels good. Same with the shell, I use fish, but most shells provide built-in batteries. Like interactive completions etc. Additionally I use starship to make it look a bit nicer.

For this you can use bottom, it’s a nice replacement for htop, providing also some cool widgets with ascii graphs etc. really cool.

This is honestly my favorite I never figured the find command out, if I searched for a file, I mostly used find . |rg filename. Ik its not that hard to read the man page and jut learn how to use it, but I just want to use my find utility like {cmd} filename, and fd just gives me this. Additionally it lets you easily filter for extensions, with regex or even execute a command on all the results in parallel, like below I converted all jpg images in this post folder to webp

For this you can use eza, it’s like ls with icon & color support and at the same time has the tree command builtin. Also there exists lsd which is ls with colors & icons

ZelliJ can be used here, its pretty easy and shows hints at the bottom, making it easier to do the stuff you want without remembering all the tmux shortcuts ;P

The showcase is already in the eza screenshot

You can replace sudo with sudo-rs which is a reimplementation in rust, making it imo a worthy secure upgrade, at least I use sudo quite a lot, and eliminating the whole class of memory safety issues is quite a big chunk.

Instead of grep I use ripgrep (short just rg), its wayyyyyy faster and allows you to even search file content directly etc.

There is actually a similiar It’s Foss Post, if you have the free time, you might also read this if you like rust replacements ;P