Category: Rust

using rustified fish

whbeebe

Rust, the language, has been moving ever deeper into infrastructure development. Rust is being used to write new code (see the drama going on within the Linux kernel developer community as an example). Rust is also being used to replace existing infrastructure, a prime example being the Rust Coreutils being written to replace the GNU Coreutils. The biggest draw to use Rust is its promise of safer memory usage compared to either C or C++ (and yes, they are separate languages and should not be called C/C++). Another draw appears to be better performance between equivalent versions of the same tools, with the performance lead going to the Rust-based rewrites. The biggest draw is that it’s fired up the imaginations of a new generation (if you will) of software developers. It’s all good, even for a very old dog such as myself.

An important re-write in, or migration to, Rust is the fish shell. The fish development team announced in 2024 that they would be migrating to Rust with the version 4 release of fish in 2025. They’ve now reached the point where they announced their first beta release of the shell. I cloned their Github repository and quickly compiled a local copy of the beta release to experiment with. So far, based on my admittedly limited testing, they’ve done an excellent job. Being a beta release I’m sure there are obscure corner cases where this new and major port will have some bugs, but for day-to-day use, so far, the Rust-based beta is indistinguishable from the older C++-based release.

Links

fish — https://fishshell.com

fish on github — https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/

system76’s alpha 2 cosmic desktop environment

whbeebe

I re-installed System 76’s Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2 into a virtual machine tonight. I know I was a little harsh about Alpha 1, and accused the system of not properly handling keyboard input. It turns out that the problem was actually with QEMU/KVM itself, because the keyboard input problem affected all the virtual machines I have installed on this system. That problem seems to have mysteriously fixed itself (probably with an update), so that keyboard input is acting normal again.

I’ve managed to install Hack Nerd Fonts and the PowerLine packages for both the bash shell as well as vim. I also grabbed and installed fastfetch from the fastfetch git repo. You’ll note that fastfetch shows the desktop is Cosmic under the Wayland graphics subsystem. The overall Cosmic desktop environment alpha 2 has shown solid improvement over alpha 1. I won’t go over any specifics as there’s already plenty written on this releases new and improved features. Rather this is a personal validation of the glowing praise I’ve read so far. It does live up to the praise it’s receiving right now.

Is it good enough to use as a daily driver? For me, not yet. For anyone else, that’s something they’re going to have to determine on a case-by-case basis. Even if it is an alpha, it’s good enough to begin that consideration for many.