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Comment by jchook | Hacker News Reader

Adding this to the pile of awesome tool replacements written in Rust that I use on a daily basis including ripgrep, exa, bat, and alacritty

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“delta” is another one worth looking at. I like the look of “dog” a lot! Also, TIL the EUPL, which looks rather interesting.

Just took a look at all the tools you listed (besides ripgrep, as I've already been using it). Exa and bat look great! Just installed them and am looking forward to using them. I'm having a hard time convincing myself to leave iTerm for Alacritty, just for a speed boost. I've never had speed issues with iTerm, but I'm wondering if there is anything else you like about alacritty that might change my mind.

fd-find is great replacement for find. And tokei is a good tool for some basic stats about your codebase.

Knew I was forgetting a big one. fd is so dang handy.

Some others: dust (like du), procs (like ps), zoxide (z), and sd (like sed)

Alacritty is more lightweight/cruft-free IMO, and cross-platform. Personally I don't want iTerm's settings menu or tabs; I do want one configuration that I can use on multiple platforms when the need arises.

I agree with this, though I still use iTerm over Alacritty simply because iTerm’s font rendering is better (in my opinion).

I like a few things about alacritty - it handles file drag and drop better than some IMO; config takes effect immediately and has extensive options (eg arbitrary keyboard mapping); I somehow got shift-enter to work on vim which I had trouble with in other emus; it’s noticeably fast.

On the downside it has no tabs and fewer typical GUI features like right click.

If you love your emulator I wouldn’t suggest switching.

I found I had to start using tmux locally after switching to alacritty, but I count that as a good thing to learn and know.

> I'm having a hard time convincing myself to leave iTerm for Alacritty, just for a speed boost.

I've never understood why anyone would want a higher-throughput terminal. Better latency I could see, but throughput? I'm not Commander Data. I can only read so fast. If my shell is dumping text at me faster than my terminal can render, it's because I catted something I shouldn't have.

I was pleasantly surprised with bat, I expected it to be overkill but it has made its way into being aliased to cat.

Only qualm would be line number color contrast being mostly terrible, but I don't really need it as much.

What would be kind of interesting is if it would read vim colorschemes, so your cat output is syntax highlighted like if you were editing it.

All these tools are fantastic, though I greatly prefer kitty to alacritty.

Care to elaborate on your preference?

I haven't used Alacritty as much, but Kitty is faster, easier to configure and very convenient in its splits. I believe there's also some problem that Alacritty has with fonts that Kitty doesn't, but I don't remember exactly what.

bat is the first thing a brew install on a fresh Macbook setup. Been using it for years with no idea it's written in Rust.

don't forget to add to your list all the new documentation you'll be reading!

One beauty of rg, sd, fd, etc is that they work almost exactly like their counterparts except they have better default behavior

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