Honest question...why?

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?

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.

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'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.

I don't know man, those tools - they seem rusty to me.

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.

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.