Mahmoud Ashraf

Posted on Aug 21, 2020 • Edited on Sep 21, 2020 • Originally published at mahmoudashraf.dev

My terminal became more Rusty 🦀

#rust #linux #productivity #tutorial

As a Software-Engineer I spent most of the time inside my terminal, So
I need for that a fast terminal with fast tools to speed up my productivity.

The tools written in rust help me to achieve that. let's see in this article
these tools.

tl;dr

alacritty A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

starship 🌌 The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

exa A modern version of ‘ls’.

bat A cat(1) clone with wings.

delta A viewer for git and diff output

zoxide A faster way to navigate your filesystem

ripgrep ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern

fd A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

bottom Yet another cross-platform graphical process/system monitor.

tldr 📚 Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands

spotify-tui Spotify for the terminal written in Rust 🚀

gitui Blazing 💥 fast terminal-ui for git written in rust 🦀

Alacritty

Let's start our list with alacritty terminal is one of the fastest terminals
because of using GPU for rendering, and it is a cross-platform terminal.

You can customize your own configuration like color scheme, fonts, opacity, and key mapping.

Alacritty doesn't come with ligature support but you can use
this fork. or if
you are using Arch you can install it from aur

Starship

I used to use zsh + powerlevel9k as my prompt and even when I migrate to powerlevel10k, I still
notice a delay when open new shell. But with starship it's start instantly.

You can use it with any shell bash, zsh, fish and even powerShell.

The screenshot below showing the result of my customized configuration.

Exa

exa is an implementation of ls command but with colors and icons and it renders very fast.

I'm using exa as replacer for ls command by making an alias.

if [ "$(command -v exa)" ]; then
    unalias -m 'll'
    unalias -m 'l'
    unalias -m 'la'
    unalias -m 'ls'
    alias ls='exa -G  --color auto --icons -a -s type'
    alias ll='exa -l --color always --icons -a -s type'
fi

the result of my ls and ll commands.

Bat

Bat is an implementation for cat command but with syntax highlighted.

Also I make an alias for this command with nord theme.

if [ "$(command -v bat)" ]; then
  unalias -m 'cat'
  alias cat='bat -pp --theme="Nord"'
fi

Delta

delta enhance your git diff output by adding some cool features like syntax highlighting,
line numbering, and side-by-side view.

to make delta works in your .gitconfig file add:

[core]
  pager = delta
[interactive]
  diffFilter = delta --color-only
[delta]
  side-by-side = true
  line-numbers-left-format = ""
  line-numbers-right-format = "│ "
  syntax-theme = Nord

we set delta as the default pager for git commands output and enable side-by-side
feature and set a theme for Nord, You can choose your preferred theme run and choose one.

delta --list-syntax-themes

Zoxide

I don't use any file explorer, I just use cd command to navigate between the files and ls command.

I have a projects directory on my home directory if I wanna navigate to a project of these projects.
I will write

cd ~/projects/mahmoudashraf.dev

instead I will write

z ~/projects/mahmoudashraf.dev

just in the first time and if I wanna navigate again to this directory from anywhere
just write

z mah

Ripgrep

It is a cross-platform command line searches your directory for a regex pattern.

I recommend you read this article ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift}
.

some commands that i'm using

# search on javascript files for specific regex
rg tjs "import React"

rg "\.content" -g "*.pug"

Fd

the friendly version of find command, and faster.

It's by default ignore .gitignore file

in this tutorial I have some screenshots in png format to convert them all to jpg:

fd -e png -x convert {} {.}.jpg

To delete files

fd -H '^\.DS_Store$' -tf -X rm

bottom

In this time not top 😀 it is bottom

it's a cross-platform system monitor.

Tldr

tldr is a cheatsheets for CLIs, instead of read the whole man.

More Tools?

for who want lightweight alternative for spotify client you can use spotify-tui.
also if you prefer an UI interface for git check gitui.

and there is a ton of CLIs and tools written in rust you can check
lib.rs/command-line-utilities.

Top comments (28)

Heiker • Aug 22 '20

Cool. Now all you need is a rusty interactive shell. Have you heard about nushell?

Himujjal Upadhyaya • Aug 22 '20

I was going to comment about nushell! And to my surprise its the first comment. nushell is out of this world. Unlike JavaScript and Python this will be an actual scripting language. Concise and fast.

Then I guess we will have two kinds of programming languages:

Statically typed -> AOT compiled
NuShell / Powershell

Mahmoud Ashraf • Aug 22 '20

Yeah I tried nushell before, it's pretty nit. but since zsh compatible with all bash commands and fast, i don't have a reason to go nushell.

Roman Perepelitsa • Aug 22 '20

I used to use zsh + powerlevel9k as my prompt and even when I migrate to powerlevel10k, I still notice a delay when open new shell.

Powerlevel10k has a feature called Instant Prompt. Once you enable it, zsh will start instantly even if your .zshrc loads a dozen of slow plugins. AFAIK, Powerlevel10k is the only theme that can effectively reduce zsh startup time to zero without invasive changes to your configs.

As far as prompt speed goes (that is, the lag or absence thereof after every command), Powerlevel10k is currently significantly ahead of Starship. See github.com/starship/starship/discu....

Mahmoud Ashraf • Aug 22 '20

it's seems interesting, I'll give powerlevel10k another try.

rhymes • Aug 23 '20

I use exa, bat, delta, zoxide, fd and my absolute favorite of them all: ripgrep. I'll check the others out. Thank you Mahmoud!

Abdullah Tayel • Aug 23 '20

I actually never searched for a spaceship prompt faster alternative, and had reverted back to minimal. Thanks for the heads up will definitely be using starship.

You have like the exact setup I have but I still prefer iterm2 than alacrity on macOS, but yea on windows alacrity definitely wins for me.

Corey Alexander • Aug 26 '20

Ohh I didn't realize someone had a form of Alacritty with ligatures! That's super interesting! Will have to check that out!
I want to use a ligature font more but the Alacritty support has been holding me back

harishav • Aug 30 '20

When i am trying to setup bat in my macos system, i have added the snippet you have provided in the .bash_profile file, i am getting below error whenever i open my terminal.

-bash: unalias: -m: invalid option
unalias: usage: unalias [-a] name [name ...]

Can someone help what's missing

Mahmoud Ashraf • Aug 30 '20

use -a instead of -m in the bash

harishav • Aug 30 '20

Thanks for quick response, will give it a try.

Abdur Rehman Khalid • Aug 26 '20

I work on the KDE Neon Plasma and Its terminal is simple black and white and there is nothing attractive and colorful about it. Thank you very much for taking some time and writing this cool and amazing post.

From all the above suggestions, I will be using Starship as it looks very simple and cool.