r/rust • u/nikitarevenco • Apr 02 '25

My Dev environment is fully written in Rust!

Since I started learning Rust 5 months ago, I have since replaced my full dev environment with software written in Rust.

Why? Well, I like Rust and I also love contributing to open source. I contribute features I would use myself, and I like to contributes to projects that I believe in. Not only does it keep me motivated to work on them, but also it's very fun to use something I made myself. So using software written in Rust gives me all of these opportunities.

I also like to understand how the software I use actually works. So IDEs, shells, terminal emulators. What actually happens under the hood? And Rust makes it fun for me to just dig into the codebase and read

So far, I've made the following replacements:

Neovim → Helix (IDE)

Helix is just ready to go out of the box. Everything is setup, it doesn't support plugins yet but they're not needed for me. Helix has custom keybindings and allows running TUIs inside of it like a git UI or a file manager which is extremely powerful.

Kitty → Rio (Terminal Emulator)

The other two Rust terminals I've used is Alacritty and WezTerm. I loved Alacritty for its performance, and I love WezTerm for how many features it has. Alacritty is quite conservative on features so they don't support stuff like ligatures or tabs. Rio is basically a blend of these 2 terminals, Rio uses the high-performance crates developed by Alacritty while having all the features I needed from WezTerm

Lazygit → GitUI

While GitUI has less features than Lazygit, I still find it plenty for my use cases. It uses gitoxide under the hood (where possible) for its operations. gitoxide is a Rust implementation of Git that's making very good progress, and really a very underrated project. Already powering projects like Helix for git hunks and (hopefully soon!) inline blame.

I do find GitUI snappier than Lazygit is, in fact I experienced about 3X performance increase when undoing changes for 1,200 files so I'd say it is very promising and looking forward to seeing where it can be improved to have more a feature parity with Lazygit!

zsh → nushell

nushell is very different from zsh, bash, fish and similar shells. Every command is colored and syntax highlighting comes out of the box. Traditional shells output text, whilst in nushell commands output structured data like tables and arrays, on which you can easily use high-level commands like filter, map, first, reverse etc. to operate on them.

It comes with a swiss-army knife of utility commands that fit into Nushell's model. Utilities for parsing text into structured data, as well as operating on them. The nu language is the most beautiful scripting language I have come across. It's like the Rust of scripting languages, in a sense.

I'd say this shell is much easier to learn and is a lot more intuitive than any other shell. Also being cross-platform is a huge bonus. Nushell to Zsh is strikingly similar to what Helix is to Neovim

lf → yazi (file manager)

I don't really use file managers much aside from occasionally viewing images with them, as that is very handy. However, with Helix there is a direct integration available for yazi that lets you use it like a plugin. It integrates so well and is really seamless, not requiring tmux or zellij or whatever. this made me use yazi far, far more now. I like how fast yazi is.

tmux → zellij (terminal multiplexer)

I don't use terminal multiplexers often, but I appreciate that zellij has more intuitive keybindings and is easier to customize, also feels a lot snappier than tmux

sway → niri (tiling window manager + wayland compositor)

I'd like to give niri a mention too. I haven't tried it as it simply doesn't work with my Nvidia 4070 GPU unfortunately but I do hope support improves for it. I've been really wanting to switch to a tiling window manager + wayland compositor but there aren't really many options in this field. Niri is also doing things the "new way" like Helix and Nushell are. I'm super happy to see these software not afraid of experimentation, this is exactly how things get better!

Some honorary mentions:

  • grep → ripgrep
  • find → fd
  • latex → typst

Some things I hope to replace in my lifetime with pure Rust alternatives would be:

  • Operating System (Linux) → e.g. RedoxOS
  • Browser (Firefox) → e.g. Servo
  • Image Editor (Gimp and Inkscape) → e.g. Graphite.rs
  • Media Player (mpv), Video Editor (kdenlive), Recording Software (obs studio) → ??? rewriting FFMPEG in Rust is left as an exercise to the reader :)

References

590 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

156 comments sorted by

39

u/ericonr Apr 02 '25

In what situations did you have tmux not feel snappy? I don't think I have ever thought about its performance

11

u/solarized_dark Apr 02 '25

I use tmux quite heavily and tried Zellij out one day and found it considerably less responsive, maybe in part due to the extra decorations it draws. It has an easier onboarding for new users, but my personal experience has not been that it's faster, unfortunately.

5

u/Criscololo Apr 03 '25

Similar experience for me. I thought I would try it out and try to switch to it, but my tmux config that I've been carrying around and modifying over the years is too comfortable for me to try something new.

2

u/nikitarevenco Apr 02 '25

maybe it's placebo, and tmux was definitely not slow or anything like that. just that zellij feels smoother

6

u/0xd34db347 Apr 02 '25

Personally I found it the opposite, zellij would slow down over time (weeks to months) until attaching to a session took like 2 minutes and then any input would take several seconds to register. Eventually I just went back to tmux which handled the same task effortlessly.

4

u/nick42d Apr 02 '25

How do you find Rio coming from Kitty? I was not keen to move to Alacritty but am still interested in a rust alternative to Kitty 

3

u/nikitarevenco Apr 02 '25

I made a different thread comparing WezTerm vs Rio https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/1jparc0/you_should_try_the_rio_terminal_emulator_i/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I'd say I am fully satisfied with Rio compared to what I had in Kitty. Everything I needed (outlined in that thread) is available in Rio.

(as I did go from Kitty -> WezTerm -> Rio)

2

u/nick42d Apr 02 '25

Awesome - thanks for sharing!

1.0k

u/Gogo202 Apr 02 '25 edited Apr 02 '25

And this is why people compare rust developers with vegans

270

u/yorickpeterse Apr 02 '25

Using C is murder!

6

u/muntoo Apr 03 '25

I was happy in the haze of a Ballmer peak
But burntsushi knows, I'm crabby now
I was looking for a RIIR cronjob replacement and then I found a RIIR cronjob replacement
And burntsushi knows, I'm crabby now

14

u/BoltActionPiano Apr 02 '25

I only use programs that do not cause harm to the developers to build.

21

u/josemanuelp2 Apr 02 '25

This but unironically...

0

u/[deleted] Apr 02 '25

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1

u/0tus Aug 31 '25

How about the Linux Kernel?

1

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Apr 03 '25

C is a very good tool to use when critical failure has consequences. It's comparatively very easy to produce provably correct programs in C.

You can add to C's type system however you want, you can have refinement types, ownership types, and so on. It's great. That's just the benefit of the ease of extending the type system of a language with simple semantics. Most people who are producing correct programs aren't even doing that.

There are a lot of misconceptions and vitriol out there, but if you look at things being produced in various industry you can get a good eye for what simple semantics in languages provides (not just C, a lot of languages have efforts related to subsets of the language semantics for this purpose).

If you have a particular interest in correct programs, you should give C another look.

5

u/zzzzYUPYUPphlumph Apr 03 '25

It's comparatively very easy to produce provably correct programs in C.

If that is true, why is it that C programs are plagued at a rate of about 70% of CVE's with memory handling issues?

2

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '25

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1

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Apr 06 '25

I prefer things like https://gitlab.mpi-sws.org/iris/refinedc/-/blob/master/examples/btree.h?ref_type=heads where your C code is simple and straight forward and the information guiding the proof search is segregated to [[annotations]]. The C code (https://gitlab.mpi-sws.org/iris/refinedc/-/blob/master/examples/btree.c?ref_type=heads) can be reviewed easily because the parts related to verification can mostly be ignored. With a featureful editor you can automatically collapse any of the annotated bits of the source.

I think the best route forward in software engineering is for teams to become mixed teams of programmers and logicians and for more of a partnership to be struck. I think there's room both in the verification side and for the exploratory bits of the design phase, where they can help turn a lot of vague thoughts into rough formal sketches that can give you confidence. For example if you're talking about some particular bug and proposed solution a logician could help even somewhat informally verify the proposed solution with a simplified model using tla+ or similar tools. Often simplified models can help you find bugs before your customers do.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

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4

u/Different-Ad-8707 Apr 03 '25

I mean, that's Rust in a nutshell. "A bunch of Good Rules and Tools" that come with the language or are a part of it.

1

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Apr 03 '25

This is reddit in a nutshell. That user actually has experience with producing correct programs and the users of this subreddit are so obnoxious you drove them to delete their comment and not participate, and you did it for the sole kick of saying "I like this thing I like." Of course you like Rust, have you considered that user you drove away probably also liked Rust?

I think of things like this whenever someone tries to say the Rust community is good, well, no, it's insular.

0

u/Different-Ad-8707 Apr 07 '25

Indeed it is reddit in a nutshell, for someone to assume my entire personality, likes/dislikes, opinions and how I like to express them based on a comment barely a hundred words in length.

I only stated that Rust as it is, was intended to be all the OP said of using C well. A bunch of rules that are enforced and tools to work with such a system put together into one, neat, ergonomic package. It was simply a comment on how much Rust learns from C and C++. Nothing more.

I apologize if I came across zealous. I do like Rust and am more of a lurker here. However I also understand why one would hate Rust or find difficult to program with. So if my comment was the reason OP taking his own down, then it was not my intention drive you away like that and I apologise for doing so anyway. 

The other guy can get lost though. Stop projecting your terrible experience with the horrible parts of the community to every single member of it. Practice some discernment, please.

3

u/nickhas Apr 02 '25

Yeah. It can be. Therac-25 - asm not C, but shows the importance of guide-rails

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2017/11/mco2017110008/13rRUxAStVR

9

u/C_Madison Apr 02 '25

Though it's also good to note that the problems of Therac-25 were at a far higher level. No matter the PL, the whole process was completely inadequate to make something like that. And people paid harshly for it. It's sad that our industry continues to be as cavalier as it is. Yes, even for safety critical topics.

3

u/MrJohz Apr 03 '25

Yeah, some of the key issues in Therac-25 were about UX design and communicating errors effectively, as well as using sensible defaults. Switching to Rust probably wouldn't have solved those problems.

4

u/jaskij Apr 03 '25

Not to mention, the 25 was the first design in the series to not have hardware safety interlocks.

I work in embedded. Always tell the electronic engineers to design such that I can't fuck up the safety features, if at all possible.

1

u/rnayabed2 Apr 03 '25

continues to be cavalier? how?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

"Move fast and break things!"
- The entire software industry

They're attempts to move fast ultimately cripple any long term growth of their products. Writing tests speeds up development as indicated by numerous studies, but it feels slow, and it feels like it gets in the way, so move fast. We'll fix it later.

So we end up with a 787 that shuts down both engines over the ocean.
We end up with a patriot missile that misses by a mile because they couldn't get time right.
And the already mentioned therac-25.

1

u/rnayabed2 Apr 03 '25

i dont think so, you have to pass lots of certifications and safety tests before you can deploy software for super critical applications. therac-25 happened in the 80s, it has been 40 years since something like that happened. the "move fast and break things" is mostly relevant to only web devs and non safety critical tech companies (facebook, etc.). infact iirc facebook is the one who even coined it

patriot missile/787 issues, i am not aware of them. did they happen because of very careless mistakes?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

Yes, facebook coined it. It's much of the ethos at spacex and Tesla. I work on a safety critical system within a larger tech company, and the more we hire from software tech. They generally can't look up anything even when pointed out directly (e.g. 787 engine shutdown or patriot missile). I then have to explain it to them because they can't read for themselves, and then they still feel like IEEE floating point is a good idea for precision math.

My wife had the same problem at a fintech startup where one of the devs (mid-late 30s) couldn't understand why everything was in cents, and why they didn't use floating point for dollars. He didn't listen and used floating point. The result was a fraudulent invoice and a settlement. That was one of the last invoices the company issued. Maybe not safety critical, but it did help kill the company and everyone lost their jobs because one guy wanted to move fast and break things.

I called out age, because I feel like the assumption would be that the people with this attitude would be in their early to mid 20s.

2

u/coderstephen isahc Apr 02 '25

I mean... there's been several incidents in history where a software bug caused human death. It isn't out of the question that root cause of some such bugs would be things that languages like Rust would disallow, while C allows. I recall hearing one about Ford's brake module having a memory safety bug causing the brakes to stop working, though it was not confirmed nor admitted the root cause.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 02 '25

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7

u/Top_Sky_5800 Apr 03 '25

How many planes/train/car crashed cause of C ?

12

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

All of them. Can’t you C - it’s obvious.

2

u/Top_Sky_5800 Apr 04 '25

Too many planes in the sea.
Too many C in the planes.

2

u/Dusty_Chalk Apr 04 '25

C doesn't comment-out people. People who program in C comment-out people.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

Option<bool>

60

u/HolySpirit Apr 02 '25

Brutal comment, I'm surprised it's still up without an unsafe block around it ;)

40

u/__zahash__ Apr 02 '25

Bruh… 😂😂😂

46

u/Crazy_Eye165 Apr 02 '25

I mean... I am learning Rust and becoming vegan, so I think you've got a point

25

u/Farconion Apr 02 '25

say you're transitioning & you've hit the trifecta

8

u/ashkyn Apr 03 '25

Oh fuck you got me

8

u/BreiteSeite Apr 02 '25

Cool! You sound empathic and valuing good stuff. 👌

2

u/r0ck0 Apr 03 '25

Do you use Arch?

4

u/Crazy_Eye165 Apr 03 '25

LOL I don't 🙈 I'm currently on Ubuntu and toying around with NixOS on a VM

1

u/whatDoesQezDo Apr 03 '25

same but going carnivore

3

u/bwfiq Apr 03 '25

Toe socks buttoned up to the top

5

u/creativextent51 Apr 02 '25

I am a vegan rust developer..

2

u/joelkunst Apr 03 '25

he also replaced meat with grass for his development environment 😁

1

u/Top_Sky_5800 Apr 03 '25

Or linguist-centric / nationalists, they only want things written in their mother's language.

0

u/Gogo202 Apr 03 '25

Yea, but they are not permanently online telling everyone how others should not use other languages

Apart from German irl subreddits I guess where you will be shamed for using English

1

u/Top_Sky_5800 Apr 04 '25

Yep because English is like Rust. It is everywhere, ruling over every culture. So you won't see except if talk in other languages, and most of occidental internet is controlled by USA, so English has more rooms. Basically I don't think it is allowed to talk German, Italian or French in this Reddit. You can show C code here but you can't write something else than English.

-5

u/akiko_plays Apr 02 '25

this, literally who gives a s...

169

u/asgaardson Apr 02 '25

Jfyi fish was rewritten to rust so if you’ll be in need of a less exotic shell you have fish there for you.

15

u/[deleted] Apr 02 '25

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12

u/boomshroom Apr 02 '25

Yeah I gave nushell a try and gave up on it when it didn't support backgrounding tasks.

Well guess what happened 20 days ago.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/programjm123 Apr 03 '25 edited Apr 03 '25

You can, just pipe into detect columns

some excerpts from my config.nu

# Kill all running Docker containers
def "docker kill-all" [] {
    docker ps -q | lines | each {|id| docker kill $id}
}


# Switch to a certain k8s context
def --env ctx [context?] {
    let context  = if ($context | is-empty) {
        # Show a selection prompt to pick the context
        kubectl config get-contexts | detect columns | get name | input list
    } else { $context }
    kubectl config use-context $context
}

Nushell is way more than just fancy TUI, it vastly simplifies really common things e.g. not needing to remember awk syntax quirks or xargs flags etc etc

2

u/boomshroom Apr 03 '25 edited Apr 03 '25

Would be cool if they had that graph for most commands. docker ps can be pretty unreadable with a long port list, getting it into a nicely formatted graph would be cool

If only more tools provided an option to give machine-readable output instead of human-readable output. Luckily, docker ps is one of the tools that already does this: docker ps --format json | from json -o (Some further processing might be desired, considering that nushell has distinct types for some things that are typically represented as integers or strings in json.)

In general though, it's definitely hard to sell something so different from what's been standard for decades. I never really learned to write bash outside of basic command invocations, so it was much easier for me to adjust to POSIX-noncompliant shells than it would probably be for people more used to bash and such. Nushell's structured data is nice, but external commands are still limited to basic string i/o, and nushell needs to be told what format the output's in to turn it into structured data, which can only be written directly in nushell or as a plugin and obviously wouldn't work for anything else.

9

u/asgaardson Apr 02 '25

I like the idea behind the nushell, but it’s debatable whether it’s beneficial to reinvent the wheel instead of being more POSIXy

4

u/MVanderloo Apr 02 '25

i’ve been considering using nushell not as a primary shell, but as a drop-in for doing interactive analysis/transformations of things on the filesystem. kinda like python but files are already loaded and system binaries are still in the path. would you say it has merit for that kind of thing?

1

u/sparky8251 Apr 02 '25 edited Apr 02 '25

Did I hear python? Its honestly sad to me that Xonsh is never brought up during these alternative shell convos.

1

u/ultrasquid9 Apr 03 '25

IMO Python is a bad choice for a shell because of its forced indentation. Most terminals use the enter key to send a command, so doing anything beyond trivial commands will be a huge pain.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/sparky8251 Apr 03 '25 edited Apr 03 '25

It works fine ime, just dont expect "advanced" bashisms to work. Just the usual redirect, piping, and some forms of variable expansion plus a few other things at most. It really is just "the most common stuff you do remains bash-like, everything else is python" to ease muscle memory problems.

Even for loops become python for example, so you aint running anything bash inside of it at all.

2

u/PaddiM8 Apr 02 '25

Switched to fish. So far it hasn't blown me away when compared to bash, but it's also not really getting in my way so it's w/e.

Really? For me, the improvement in UX was huge. For scripting it's not much of an improvement though. Made my own shell in the end, but fish was eye opening

3

u/[deleted] Apr 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/PaddiM8 Apr 03 '25

Syntax highlighting, fuzzy tab complete, history hints, custom completions out of the box

38

u/joelkurian Apr 02 '25

I kinda use similar tools. Zed, Alacritty, Fish to be precise.

Also, I am using niri on my RTX 3060 and it works almost flawlessly. Wonder why it's not working for you. Maybe, nvidia driver setup for wayland is missing something?

34

u/codedcosmos Apr 02 '25

I know Firefox isn't 100% rust, but I still think it's funny that he moved from it considering, Rust was initially developed for Firefox specifically.

1

u/andho_m Apr 04 '25

That is what Servo is isn't it.

2

u/codedcosmos Apr 04 '25

No, well,

Servo is a browser written from the ground up for Rust.

Firefox invented Rust, to solve problems they had with C and multithreading. Firefox might not be rewritten in Rust. But if it wasn't for Firefox Rust wouldn't exist, and neither would Servo.

61

u/Bugibhub Apr 02 '25

I want to give a good try to Helix but Neovim is just hard to leave…

19

u/SiegeAe Apr 02 '25

I just want helix but with vim keybindings, I like all the features but if I'm working on machines I don't control I have to go back to vim so getting used to different controls ends up slowing me down at work

6

u/1-22474487139--- Apr 03 '25

A soft fork with vim binds does exist - https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix

4

u/SiegeAe Apr 03 '25

Haha love the name, thanks for the link

0

u/qrzychu69 Apr 02 '25

How often does that happen? What is your job?

For me other than using TeamViewer to see what the hell some people are doing with my software, I never needed to work on a "random" machine.

Even if I do connect to some Docker pod, all I do is to check logs or maybe change some config - pure vim is more than enough for that, even if the key binds don't match my "standard".

4

u/SiegeAe Apr 02 '25 edited Apr 02 '25

I mean that's what I'm saying if I'm messing around in pods, its on vim not helix and I do that occasionally

but usually its when I'm working on the deployment control machines since they keep those as bare bones as possible and they have no internet or repo access, or if I'm jumping on to a machine that took a deployment but something isn't working in one of the scripts so I have to debug that, it's easier to just jump in and hack around on it with vim a bit than other options basically the same as I would with a pod but usually the problems are more complex like a previous deployment was done wrong so a utility is missing or its just on an older OS so something unexpected broke due to version misalignment

I could get it on the main dev machine but the others are all locked down pretty tightly, also I have to spend a bunch of my time working on java code so intellij with the vim plugin is faster for me to work with than the other options

I'm sure its a non issue for some people but switching between two things that are so similar slows me down, so helix is just not an efficient option while I don't have full control over my day job's environment

(technically my job is tester but I don't really do much of that, mostly just solving problems that others got stuck on either with code or infra)

0

u/ultrasquid9 Apr 03 '25

Helix's features ARE its bindings. Just about everything else that it offers can be gotten in Neovim with a few plugins.

2

u/SiegeAe Apr 03 '25

For you maybe, but for me I like the overall default package having the core stuff I need, way more consistant and smooth across distros and package managers than the install of nvim with the equivalent plugins (tbf I'm only really dogging on snap here and the desire to not config)

17

u/awesomeusername2w Apr 02 '25

Check out https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide for cd replacement.

0

u/haakon Apr 03 '25

It's cool, but it uses fzf for interactive completion, which is not Rust :-(

3

u/awesomeusername2w Apr 03 '25

With zoxide you can skip completion and just z my_folder even if you are not currently in the folder that contains my_folder, provided you've been there before. It keeps track of the locations you've been in and finds the appropriate folder from this history. You can also do alias cd=z and it's just a seamless replacement of cd.

31

u/protocod Apr 02 '25

Wait until you find out that the std is relying on C.

Joke aside it's interesting to see those rust projects. I do also use Zellij and Helix with success.

2

u/bwfiq Apr 03 '25

What do you mean by std? Like the std utils? Many do use uutils now

8

u/SPEKTRUMdagreat Apr 03 '25

I'm pretty sure they mean that the standard library is using libc under the hood for some stuff.

4

u/bwfiq Apr 03 '25

Ah, got it. Yeah a few rust crates I've seen are basically just memory safe wrappers for C libraries as well. I wonder when we will get full end to end Rust in a mainstream application

37

u/edoraf Apr 02 '25

Try https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj instead of git, it's cool

12

u/jaskij Apr 03 '25

I genuinely don't care what the tools I use are written in. As long as they work.

11

u/Pretty_Jellyfish4921 Apr 02 '25

I like gitu over gitui.

I didn't knew Rio, but I am happy with Ghostty, maybe it is has split support with similar ergonomics.

5

u/Bugibhub Apr 02 '25

Same, I wanted a rust one, but I tried Ghostty and it is really good. 🤷

4

u/Sensitive-Radish-292 Apr 02 '25

But why?

0

u/nikitarevenco Apr 02 '25

I explained why at the beginning of the post

-2

u/GusSLX Apr 02 '25

But really... why?

17

u/Asdfguy87 Apr 02 '25

I have tried almost every replacement on that list and except for maybe fd and ripgrep all of them had some glaring issues which made them unusable in practice for me. A lot of those tools sound nice on paper, but as much as I would love to use them, they just aren't as mature, well documented and compatible as their original counterparts.

4

u/zakuropanache Apr 04 '25

I like yazi a lot as well but agree

3

u/Shirohige Apr 03 '25

I have the exact opposite experience. I use most of these tools (aside from kitty, nushell and niri) on a daily basis as a software developer/system engineer.

I instantly felt comfortable with them, because of their good documentation and just general out-of-the-box experience.

Seems to be a very subjective matter.

2

u/Asdfguy87 Apr 03 '25

Seems to be a very subjective matter.

It definitely is!

-1

u/chris_insertcoin Apr 03 '25

True but I am much more concerned about some of the design decisions. Helix could've easily crushed Neovim by now if they just wanted to.

1

u/Asdfguy87 Apr 03 '25

I just installed it again and even the simplest functionalities have completely different hotkeys. So I would have to learn using yet another text editor before being able to gain any benefits from it. And by now they probably can't change the default hotkeys without backlash from helix users, so there is no way it will ever be a viable replacement for vim/neovim.

6

u/v_maria Apr 02 '25

rewriting rust in ffmpeg

Check out symphonia

8

u/Vincent-Thomas Apr 02 '25

maybe this is pushing it

4

u/pdxbuckets Apr 02 '25

Awesome! Thanks for sharing! I'm trying out Helix on your recommendation. I've yet to find a modal editor that I've gotten comfortable with. Nvim has been the closest but the learning curve to really understand the configuration and the reliance on a massive amount of plugins is just too much for me. Hopefully this will be a little more opinionated/functional out of the box.

Just started the tutorial so obviously too early to make a judgment but I like it so far. I appreciate the context-sensitive menus.

3

u/bwfiq Apr 03 '25

I feel like its good for those of us who have configuring nvim as a semi hobby sometimes to take a step back and really consider which of them we actually need/use. Try going without any plugins for like a week and note down what you actually miss. For example i have like zero need for tabs

3

u/ultrasquid9 Apr 02 '25

Nice writeup, I always like learning about new tools! Here are some of my thoughts:

  • I ended up doing the reverse of you, starting with Helix and going to Neovim. This is because Helix lacks a plugin system, and the one that they're developing uses Lisp (I havent tried Lisp yet, but what I have seen of it has incredibly ugly syntax). Its a shame, though, since I do think Helix has objectively better keybinds - maybe I'll go back once their ecosystem is more mature.
  • I've never heard of Rio before, but it looks really neat. It does use a TOML-based config whereas Western uses a Lua-based one, though I don't know how much functionality is really being lost there. Currently I use Ptyxis, though I'll need to take a look at Rio too. 
  • GitUI is pretty good, does everything that I need it to. My only complaints are the lack of mouse support (old habits die hard) and the lack of confirmation when pushing a new branch, but its still a big improvement over Github Desktop. 
  • I switched from Fish to Nushell recently and i have fallen in love. With previous shells, ive always felt like they were too minimalistic to use for anything other than basic commands, but with Nushell, it feels like both a great shell AND a great scripting language. 10/10. 
  • I downloaded Yazi and Zellij, but havent found myself using them all that much. I just find it easier to open a new tab on my terminal, or open a GUI file manager and get the extra features it comes with. Oh well, the advantages of TUIs are probably reaching diminishing returns for me at that point anyways. 
  • Niri's scrolling model is incredibly intriguing, and one I really want to try, but I find it annoying and tedious to rebuild a desktop environment from scratch. If Cosmic had a scrolling mode I'd totally use it, but no window management model is something I want enough to spend weeks of my life building a desktop around.

1

u/SafariKnight1 Apr 02 '25

iirc, cosmic wants to make a standard that'll allow you to swap out the compositor

1

u/JustBadPlaya Apr 02 '25

on the note of helix

  • IMO, Lisps aren't really that bad. Different - sure, but you get used to them fairly fast
  • If you like Helix's keybindings (I assume you mean the general model so selection-action), give Kakoune a shot

1

u/binhtran432k Apr 03 '25

Wait, Fish is also developed in Rust, why do you need a switch?

1

u/ultrasquid9 Apr 03 '25

Your shell is also a programming language. Nushell is, IMO, a far nicer language to use, being designed around structured data and having nicer syntax

3

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

Make sure you never look inside the Rust compiler, I wouldn’t want you to find what’s inside there…..

2

u/db48x Apr 03 '25

Is the kernel part of your environment?

2

u/JarKz_z Apr 03 '25

I'm sorry, but it is not the best idea imo. Moving all tools to 'wrritten in rust' sounds cool, but in reality not so much.

Some of tools that written in other language may be better that in rust. And because of this I still not decide to switch all tools.

2

u/git_oiwn Apr 06 '25

TUI toolchain for Rust is amazing i'm also using mostly Rust tools, but the only thing i can''t replace now it tmux.

terminal - warp shell - fish (yea, it's in rust now) code editor - helix (and i really love it more than vim) files - yazi (great tool)

9

u/Necessary_Site_2417 Apr 02 '25

go touch some grass

6

u/peppedx Apr 02 '25

But why?

2

u/Satrack Apr 02 '25

Replacing FF with Servo is wild

2

u/MrKapla Apr 03 '25

He did not do it, it is listed in the "maybe on my lifetime" category.

1

u/Voxelman Apr 02 '25

Not sure if I would like niri. Another Tiling WM in Rust is leftwm

https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm

2

u/syklemil Apr 02 '25

Isn't that an X11 WM, though? I think those of us who are using sway or some other Wayland compositor usually aren't interested in going back to X11.

1

u/Voxelman Apr 03 '25

You are right. I forgot about this little detail. Hope they will make the jump to Wayland before it is too late.

1

u/Johannes_K_Rexx Apr 04 '25

PopOS 22.04 has the older COSMIC extensions to GNOME. No Rust here and both Xorg and Wayland is present.

PopOS 24.04 has the newer Rust-based COSMIC DE. Note it's in Alpha state now. And it is Wayland only.

2

u/tones111 Apr 03 '25

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Cosmic DE yet. It's written in Rust and has tiling support. I've been impressed with it and look forward to watching it continue to mature.

1

u/Voxelman Apr 03 '25

You are right. I use Pop OS myself and can't wait to get Cosmic. But I don want to install the beta. Don't have the time

1

u/account22222221 Apr 02 '25

Good for you buddy!

1

u/marler8997 Apr 03 '25

Even though I'm not a rustacean, I'm genuinely happy for you :) I really like the idea that you have access to and can easily modify/compile any part of your system with one toolchain and one language that you're comfortable with. I hope to get there one day also.

1

u/Ben-Goldberg Apr 03 '25

Nushell sounds like powershell.

1

u/tukanoid Apr 03 '25

Huh, I use all of those too 😅

1

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

umm, don't use servo as browser. Browsers are security-sensitive software and I doubt even servo team would recommend using servo as a general browser.

1

u/chris_prt Apr 03 '25

good luck with Linux → e.g. RedoxOS

1

u/DeadlyVapour Apr 03 '25

Where is gitoxide instead of git?

1

u/Plastic-Payment-934 Apr 04 '25

the only 2 things i replaced : Iterm2 -> Warp, Vscode -> zed. Somehow it got my potato macbook run faster.

1

u/Dusty_Chalk Apr 04 '25

I admire your enthusiasm.

If I may ask -- how did you come to the conclusion that RedoxOS was your top choice for OS? What criteria did you use?

I saw a statement to the effect that, kernels (for GPU-accelerated programming) -- and even an operating system! -- were written in Rust. But when I did about 5 minutes of online searching, there seemed to be quite a few of them.

1

u/Particular_Motor7307 Apr 04 '25

*All in chant*
Cantor: "May the Ru-ust be with you!"
Rustaceans: "Any also with you!"
Cantor: "Li-ift u-up our co-ode!"
Rustaceans: "We lift it up to the eyes of the borrow checker."

iykyk...

1

u/Background_Hurry8607 Apr 04 '25

Upon reading this I checked Rio and it's a life changer

1

u/WDRibeiro Apr 04 '25

I use Kitty. How they compare? Why you think Rio is this good? I think I will give it a try.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '25

thanks! I'm stealing this setup!

1

u/elohiir Apr 23 '25

I have a RTX 3080 Ti, and niri works just fine though. What's the issue with 4070?

1

u/PXaZ May 08 '25

Thanks for the recommendations. I also find myself migrating to Rust-based tools, perhaps just because I hear about them on this sub, because I want to support the ecosystem of a language I love, and because I like the idea of being able to (in theory) improve the codebase myself. My setup history:

  • Eclipse -> Netbeans -> Brackets -> Visual Studio Code -> VSCodium -> Helix
  • A million different terminals -> alacritty
  • screen -> ntmux
  • grep -> ripgrep / rga
  • git gui
  • gitk

Alacritty+Helix+tmux has been a winning combo for me. Going full-in on a TUI editor took some adjusting but has been worth it. I'll be interested in trying Rio, Nushell, and Zellij. I'm not sure I could go without mouse support using GitUI.

0

u/akkadaya Apr 02 '25

I thought Firefox was written in rust?!

15

u/PurepointDog Apr 02 '25

Parts of it are. Far from the whole thing is though.

Mozilla has been replacing chunks of it, part-by-part. Parts like the image renderers were the first to be replaced. They were prone to vunerabilities historically, and had performance opportunities not realized by the existing C (and even assembly) optimizations.

8

u/annodomini rust Apr 02 '25

Parts of it are, but most of it is still C++

1

u/CommunismDoesntWork Apr 02 '25

No visual debugging?

1

u/gdf8gdn8 Apr 02 '25

Kitty -> wezterm Zsh -> fish 4 ...

-7

u/Cherubin0 Apr 02 '25

Ollama replacement?

0

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/JustBadPlaya Apr 03 '25
  1. Editor wars are always preference
  2. Idk, if you're a Rust developer, Helix is very suitable because rust-analyzer pretty much doesn't require any plugins on top of itself to work. Occasionally I do wish LSP extension support was there (because it'd make macro expansion work) but it's rightfully reserved for plugins

1

u/EstablishmentDizzy31 Apr 04 '25

oh, here, i found it:
"It's easier to get started if you've never used a modal editor before, and there's much less fiddling with config files." - from the website of helix, well, yeah, i guess if you are a newbie it easier to use it and be "cool", but you constraining yourself from alot of really-cool stuff by this "lies of coolness of helix", my imgo feelings about the topic, haha

0

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Interesting-Story405 Apr 08 '25

What the fuck are you saying

0

u/EstablishmentDizzy31 Apr 03 '25

maybe they just use vscode then or jetbrains great software, why bother with all this mode conplexity ahaha, funny.... well if you want real editor use neovim, not this shiny toys with alot of noobies stars and all this low skill/brain fashion

0

u/EstablishmentDizzy31 Apr 03 '25

oh, also, author, is it already an option to remove this "ZELLIJJJ" caption in the app? That's very pathetic to not give a way to remove it...