5 CLI Tools Made With Rust To Improve Already Popular Tools

Upgrade some of your daily tools

Photo by Seyed Sina Fazeli on Unsplash

One of the main purposes the community gave for Rust as it started to get traction was the recreation of some of the more popular command line tools. It’s easy to grasp the reason for this as soon as you develop your first command line app with Rust. The combination of a low-level language with crates like clap, structopt, or console and the easiness of publishing and installing the crates with cargo makes the development of this type of software a pleasure.

Today, we’ll see five command-line tools rewritten in Rust that will catch your eye with the improvements they bring to the table.

bat

What is the only thing better than a cat? A bat. Well, maybe not, at the least if we are talking about mammals (I still do love bats, though), but in the context of a terminal, I have a point to prefer bat over cat.

bat is a command intended for the same as the UNIX built-in cat, but it features syntax highlighting and integrates with git showing the differences of the files. So, for developers like us, this is a nice improvement to a very common tool.

The feline vs the critter she tells you not to worry about

To install bat, you can follow their README or just go the Rustacean way.

cargo install bat

ripgrep

ripgrep is FAST, like, blazingly fast. That’s the best description I can make of it. Based on the name alone, you can see what this crate accomplishes: substitute grep. These are big words, as grep is an incredibly handy tool of UNIX to search text recursively, but ripgrep is the same but FASTER.

It was first started by Andrew Gallant and features more than 300 contributors on its GitHub page. It supports a lot of encodings, can be case sensitive or not, follows .gitignores content, and a lot more. Look at some benchmarks its creator offers to know what I’m talking about.

cargo install ripgrep

dust