Category: Rust

rust-lang based tools: bat, dust, zellij

whbeebe
Terminal running zellij

Environment: Ubuntu 23.10 on a Raspberry Pi 5 8 GiB with the full Rust toolchain installed.

I’ve been exploring the world of Rust recently. Rust isn’t just a language, it also seems to be an environment for nurturing interesting creativity. I’ve been working with products of that Rust-inspired creativity: zellij, bat, and dust.

zellij ( https://zellij.dev/ ) is an alternative to tmux ( https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki ). I’ve begun to use it here, with nvim, as a very lightweight alternative to full blown Visual Studio Code for rust development. I can also use it to quickly cobble together a set of views in one terminal to keep track of multiple tools looking at a wide range of system statuses. Having it all fit in multiple zellij panes is easier on the resources than having multiple independent terminals I have to keep track of on the desktop. I personally find zellij easier to use than tmux. In the first screen capture, I’ve got neofetch, btop, and duf in three individual panes in a single terminal instance. Installation is cargo install zellij.

Zillej with two panes, bat on the left, nvim on the right.

I’m contrasting bat ( https://github.com/sharkdp/bat ) with nvim to show how close, yet how different they are visually. I prefer bat over cat, and have cat aliased to bat in my environment. Sometimes all I want to do is just read a text file, and bat does it so well. Installation is cargo install bat.

Zilleg with bat on the left and dust on the right.

Finally there’s the Rust version of du, dust ( https://github.com/bootandy/dust )With dust I get a much clearer view of disk usage at any point in the filesystem. Regular du only provides byte sizes, while dust gives you a relative size graph to the right and a partial tree along with the space usage in each branch of the tree. And dust is fast. It’s the fastest utility of its type I’ve ever used. I won’t say it’s fast because of Rust, but probably a combination of clever design, coding, and Rust. Installation is cargo install du-dust.

I’m no Rust language expert. But I am growing to appreciate it as a personal tool builder as well as the foundation for excellent command line tools. I am exploring more every day as I grow to trust the current batch I’ve got installed on all my systems, both Linux and macOS.

installing deno 1.40.2 via rust’s cargo on ubuntu 23.10 & raspberry pi 5

whbeebe

I have been tinkering with Deno since before I ever started tinkering with the language it’s written in, Rust. It was Deno that finally convinced me to get serious about learning the Rust language. One of the benefits of installing Rust on any system is that you can install Deno with the Rust command cargo install deno. With that, Rust/cargo will download every source file and build Deno for you.

It’s been a while since I built Deno via Rust’s cargo. Once it’s installed you can run deno upgrade and it will pull down the latest release and install it for you. That works pretty well for any supported environment, unless you’re using Ubuntu 23.10 on a Raspberry Pi 5. If you try to install Deno the officially documented way, you get the following:

Error: Official Deno builds for Linux aarch64 are not available.

Which means you’re going to build it from source. Fortunately Rust is available for this environment or else this post wouldn’t be here.

While building Deno I did run into one significant problem. The build failed right in the middle:

Rust build error of Deno

A little bit of search led me to install protoc via sudo apt install protobuf-compiler. Once installed I followed the directions about setting CARGO_TARGET_DIR and restarted the build, which then went on to build successfully. I checked for life:

$ which deno/home/pi/.cargo/bin/deno$ deno --versiondeno 1.40.2 (release, aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu)v8 12.1.285.6typescript 5.3.3

And now I’m the proud “owner” of Deno on this Raspberry Pi 5. By the way, if you want to see how the Raspberry Pi handled the task, here’s a taste of it via btop:

btop showing Rust cargo build of Deno on a Raspberry Pi 5

You’ll note that all four cores on the processor are running 100%, yet the temperature was around 60°C. This shows how well the active cooling is working on the Raspberry Pi 5.