New tools
Table of contents
Abstract
I am amazed by the amount of new software that is high quality, good-looking, and easy to use. Here are some of the favorites that I have encountered. Some of these (probably the majority) are written in Rust.
List of new tools
Starship
Starship is a simple, fast, and customizable cross-platform prompt for command line shells. It is designed to be lightweight and efficient, while still offering a wide range of customization options to suit your individual needs. With Starship, you can easily switch between different shells and operating systems without having to worry about how to carry your prompt with you. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced command line user, Starship is an excellent tool to improve your productivity and make your workflow more seamless.
You might be familiar with the following already, but this is what it looks like:
Alacritty
Alacritty is a high-performance terminal emulator that offers a range of customization options while still maintaining sensible defaults.
These are some of Alacritty’s noteworthy features:
- Vi Mode — Move around and create selections using vi bindings
- Search — Search for any text within the scrollback buffer
- Regex Hints — Mark any text for mouse or keyboard interaction
- Multi-Window — Improve resource usage by using only a single Alacritty process
Helix
Helix is a new text editor that is designed to be fast, intuitive, and customizable. It features a modern, minimalist user interface. My favorite feature is the integration with Tree-sitter which is probably the fastest parser generator out there.
Ruff
After trying to use many other linters before, Ruff does a great job while being extremely fast.
Ruff aims to be orders of magnitude faster than alternative tools while
integrating more functionality behind a single, common interface.
Ripgrep
ripgrep is a tool that allows you to search for a specific pattern (expressed using a regular expression) within the files in a directory and its subdirectories. It is designed to be fast and efficient, and it has some helpful default behaviors, such as ignoring files and directories that are listed in a .gitignore file and skipping over hidden files and binary files. This makes it a convenient and reliable option for quickly searching through large codebases or other collections of files. It is usually much faster than grep or similar alternatives.
Exa
exa is a new version of the classic ls command that is included with Unix and Linux operating systems. It provides several additional features and improvements over the original ls, such as the use of color coding to distinguish different file types and metadata. If you are a command line user, you might find exa to be a helpful and modern replacement for the standard ls command.
Zola
Zola is a static content management system (CMS) written in Rust. Zola is designed to be fast, easy to use, and flexible, making it a good choice for building static websites and blogs. Some of the key features of Zola include its Markdown support using CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown, Sass compilation, syntax highlighting, and the ability to generate a table of contents. It is less featureful than Hugo though.
Duf
Duf is a disk usage utility (similar to the widely used df) for displaying free disk space in a visually more appealing manner.
Closing
These are the new tools that I use nowadays hopefully it is useful for some of you as well.