When I saw the landing page, I reckoned it looked good, and then I thought these very words to myself as I went to the installation page: “ah, but is it written in Rust?” Because if it is, then I know I can install it both quickly and easily, and expect it to run fast as well. Command line tools written in Perl, Python, Node, JavaScript are always more effort to get going, and much more effort if you’re (a) using Windows, or (b) unwilling to pollute /usr or equivalent with things that won’t be managed by the OS’s package manager.
Every non-standard tool that you get in the habit of using is another piece of friction when switching machines or using a machine not configured as your own, where you may not even be able to install things. With Rust, I know I’ll be able to get it going easily, regardless of whether it’s in some OS-level package manager: it’ll be a single binary that I can just drop into my personal bin directory, and it’ll just work.
Seriously, the deployment story is just so good for languages that compile into a single statically-linked binary, when compared with dynamic languages.
So my threshold for “will I bother trying this non-standard tool out?” tends to be much lower for something written in Rust. I have several Rust utilities that I take the trouble of installing, and now only one non-Rust utility that I use in this fashion, git-revise (Python, and git-rebase is generally a tolerable alternative if I can’t set git-revise up).
Well then, back to my narrative. I wasn’t actually expecting it to be in Rust (though on reflection, why not?), but when I saw “cargo install broot”, I cackled aloud.
Every non-standard tool that you get in the habit of using is another piece of friction when switching machines or using a machine not configured as your own, where you may not even be able to install things. With Rust, I know I’ll be able to get it going easily, regardless of whether it’s in some OS-level package manager: it’ll be a single binary that I can just drop into my personal bin directory, and it’ll just work.
Seriously, the deployment story is just so good for languages that compile into a single statically-linked binary, when compared with dynamic languages.
So my threshold for “will I bother trying this non-standard tool out?” tends to be much lower for something written in Rust. I have several Rust utilities that I take the trouble of installing, and now only one non-Rust utility that I use in this fashion, git-revise (Python, and git-rebase is generally a tolerable alternative if I can’t set git-revise up).
Well then, back to my narrative. I wasn’t actually expecting it to be in Rust (though on reflection, why not?), but when I saw “cargo install broot”, I cackled aloud.
And I’ve just run `cargo install broot`.