Overview

Recently there has been a trend of rewriting or replacing common system cli tools in rust, and some outright completely new tools filling additional niches. Possibly because rust is such a great systems programming language, but also in some cases people are looking for a simple project to learn rust, and so re-writing an existing tool is a relatively straightforward first project. As a result, while there are some truly excellent tools out there, there are just as many that have been quickly abandoned by their owners. below is the list of tools that I find myself installing on any new nix system, whether it's a remote host I use for dev, or a local WSL or MacOs instance.

I'll attempt to update this as I make changes. But it will always remain my personal preferences. For a more objective summary of the available tools see the links in References

While some of these tools come with installers, I often just use cargo install <tool> where available. That way I can be sure of having the latest version, and I quite like the feeling of compiling everything from scratch. Echoes of Gentoo Linux :).

Specific Tools

• eza : ls replacement. Adds colors, icons and a bunch of other enhancements.
• lla : Another (newer) ls replacement. Comes with git integration, timeline view, a complete plugin system and more. This one is brand new ( as of March 2025 ), but looks much more ambitions.
• zellij : awesome tmux alternative. Super easy to use for newbies, with a discoverable ui and set of shortcuts.
• fd : Find replacement.
• fish Shell : Fish shell - newly re-written in Rust !
• nushell : Another shell, bsed on data pipelines, built from the start in rust. Kinda like powershell but more unixy.
• Helix Editor
• Dysx - Yet another file system lister.
• Zola - The Static Site generator behind this blog.

Screenshots

Dysk

Zellij

References

• Terminal Trove
• Awesome Rust Tools
• Awesome CLI Rust