A curated list of command-line utilities written in Rust
Note that I have not tried all of these personally and cannot and do not vouch for all of the tools listed here. In most cases, the descriptions below are copied directly from their code repos at the time I found them. Some projects may have been abandoned. Investigate before installing/using.
The ones I use regularly use are: bat, fd, fend, hyperfine, miniserve, ripgrep, just, cargo-audit and cargo-wipe. (I'm torn between dust and erdtree...)
Unix-to-Rust replacements (or near-replacements)
| unix | rust | stars | last release |
|---|---|---|---|
| cat | bat | ||
| cd | zoxide | ||
| cp | xcp | ||
| df | lfs | ||
| diff | delta | ||
| diff | difftastic | ||
| du | dua | ||
| du | dust | ||
| du | dutree | ||
| du | erdtree | ||
| du | pdu | ||
| find | fd | ||
| grep | ripgrep | ||
| ls | exa | ||
| ls | lsd | ||
| ps | procs | ||
| rm | rip | ||
| sed | sd |
Full list of Rust tools
atuin
"Magical shell history"
bandwhich
Terminal bandwidth utilization tool
bat
A replacement for cat that provides syntax highlighting and other features.
bottom
Yet another cross-platform graphical process/system monitor.
broot
A new way to see and navigate directory trees
choose
A human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and (sometimes) awk
counts
"A tool for ad hoc profiling"
delta
A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output
difftastic
A syntax-aware diff
dog
A command-line DNS client
dua
"View disk space usage and delete unwanted data, fast."
dura
"Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories and commits your uncommitted changes without impacting HEAD, the current branch, or the Git index (staged files)."
dust
"a more intuitive version of du in Rust"
dutree
"a tool to analyze file system usage written in Rust"
erdtree
A multi-threaded file-tree visualizer and disk usage analyzer. (I usually use it as et -l 1 -s size )
exa
"A modern version of ls". Note: See this discussion re: maintenance. (website)
fclones
an "efficient duplicate file finder"
fd
"A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find"
felix
tui file manager with vim-like key mapping
ffsend
"Easily and securely share files from the command line. A fully featured Firefox Send client."
frum
A modern Ruby version manager written in Rust
fselect
"Find files with SQL-like queries"
git-cliff
"A highly customizable Changelog Generator that follows Conventional Commit specifications"
gptman
"A GPT manager that allows you to copy partitions from one disk to another and more"
grex
A command-line tool and library for generating regular expressions from user-provided test cases
himalaya
Command-line interface for email management
htmlq
Like jq, but for HTML. Uses CSS selectors to extract bits of content from HTML files.
hyperfine
Command-line benchmarking tool
inlyne
"GPU powered yet browsless tool to help you quickly view markdown files"
intelli-shell
"Like IntelliSense, but for shells"
jless
"command-line JSON viewer designed for reading, exploring, and searching through JSON data."
joshuto
"ranger-like terminal file manager written in Rust"
jql
A JSON query language CLI tool
just
Just a command runner (seems like an alternative to make)
legdur A "simple CLI program to compute hashes of large sets of files in large directory structures and compare them with a previous snapshot."
lemmeknow
Identify mysterious text or analyze hard-coded strings from captured network packets, malwares, and more.
lfs
A Linux utility to get information on filesystems; like df but better
lsd
The next generation ls command (though personally I prefer exa)
macchina
Fast, minimal and customizable system information frontend.
mcfly
Fly through your shell history.
mdBook
Create books from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust
mdcat
Fancy cat for Markdown
miniserve
A "CLI tool to serve files and dirs over HTTP". I use this as a replacement for python -m http.server.
monolith
Save complete web pages as a single HTML file
mprocs
Run multiple commands in parallel
ouch
"Painless compression and decompression for your terminal"
pastel
A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.
pdu
"Highly parallelized, blazing fast directory tree analyzer"
pipr
"A tool to interactively write shell pipelines."
procs
A modern replacement for ps written in Rust
pueue
A command-line task management tool for sequential and parallel execution of long-running tasks.
qsv
CSVs sliced, diced & analyzed. (A fork of xsv)
rargs
xargs + awk with pattern matching support.
rip
A safe and ergonomic alternative to rm
ripgrep
A faster replacement for GNU's grep command. This tool is very good. See ripgrep-all to search PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.
ripsecrets
Find secret keys in your code before committing them to git. I've contributed to this one!
rnr
"A command-line tool to batch rename files and directories"
ruff
An extremely fast Python linter, written in Rust.
ruplacer
Find and replace text in source files
sd
Intuitive find & replace CLI (sed alternative).
skim
A command-line fuzzy finder.
tealdear
A very fast implementation of tldr in Rust.
teehee
"A modal terminal hex editor"
tin-summer
Find build artifacts that are taking up disk space
tokei
Count your (lines of) code, quickly
topgrade
Upgrade all of your tools
watchexec
Execute commands in response to file modifications. (Note: See cargo watch if you want to watch a Rust project.)
xcp
An extended cp
xh
"Friendly and fast tool for sending HTTP requests"
xplr
"A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer"
xsv
A fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust.
zet
Take the union, intersection, difference, etc of files -- compare to uniq and comm.
zoxide
A smarter cd command.
Calculators
eva
"a calculator REPL, similar to bc(1)"
fend
"Arbitrary-precision unit-aware calculator" (Documentation). I prefer this calculator.
Kalker
"a calculator with math syntax that supports user-defined variables and functions, complex numbers, and estimation of derivatives and integrals"
Terminal emulators / terminal-related
Alacritty:
A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.
Starship:
Customizable prompt for any shell.
Wezterm:
A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust
Zellij:
A terminal workspace with batteries included.
Text editors written in Rust
kibi
"A text editor in <=1024 lines of code, written in Rust"
Ox
An independent Rust text editor that runs in your terminal!
See this "Battle of the [Rust] text editors" post from 2022 or this r/rust post.
Email clients
himalaya
"Command-line interface for email management"
All core utils!?
Note that there is "a cross-platform reimplementation of the GNU coreutils in Rust". I link it here for those interested, but I argue that it doesn't quite fit into this project's goals.
Tools to help working with Rust lang itself
bacon:
A background Rust code checker
cargo watch:
Watches over your Cargo project's source.
cargo-audit: Audit Cargo.lock files for crates with security vulnerabilities reported to the RustSec Advisory Database. See also: cargo-deny and/or cargo-about.
cargo-binstall:
"Binary installation for [R]ust projects"
cargo-cache
Display information on the cargo cache (~/.cargo/ or $CARGO_HOME). Optional cache pruning.
cargo-crev:
A cryptographically verifiable code review system for the cargo (Rust) package manager.
cargo-dist:
"Shippable application packaging for Rust"
cargo-geiger:
Detects usage of unsafe Rust in a Rust crate and its dependencies.
cargo-wipe:
Cargo subcommand that recursively finds and optionally wipes all "target" or "node_modules" folders that are found in the current path. See also: kondo.
kani-verifier:
A "bit-precise model checker for Rust."
Other lists of Rust command line utilities
Tips
exa aliases I use in my ~/.bashrc
alias ls='exa'
alias l='exa -l --all --group-directories-first --git'
alias ll='exa -l --all --all --group-directories-first --git'
alias lt='exa -T --git-ignore --level=2 --group-directories-first'
alias llt='exa -lT --git-ignore --level=2 --group-directories-first'
alias lT='exa -T --git-ignore --level=4 --group-directories-first'
else
alias l='ls -lah'
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias la='ls -A'
fi
bat alias to act more like cat
Shameless plug: Tools that I've written in Rust
Tidy
A Swiss army knife for word lists
Medic
Check the "health" of passwords in a KeePass database
QRForge
Safely transform between 32-character TOTP secret keys and their QR codes
Criteria for submitting a tool to this list
If you know of a Rust command line tool that you think would be a good fit for this list, open an issue or a PR. Note that I generally only consider projects that have 100 or more stars on GitHub, which I'm hoping means that the program will be a bit battle-tested and ready for real-world use. I also reserve the right to reject submissions even if they meet this criteria.
You're of course welcome to fork this project and maintain your own list! Check the included LICENSE for more information.