Just curious. I'm a Rust developer. But I don't see myself discriminating between tools written in C, C++, Rust, Zig, etc. They all seem easy to install and use, as long as they're reasonably bugfree. Scripting languages are slightly different as they require me to maintain their respective interpreters and tools on my system. What difference do you see between applications written in Rust and those written in other compiled languages?
I agree the underlying technology doesn’t ultimately matter, but as user of a lot of fairly modern rust-based cli tools there definitely is something in the air worth mentioning.
I suspect it’s a couple of things. A new generation of programmers are hitting the scene, wanting to do things in new ways. Not inherently good or bad, but the new tools sure usually are at least very _pretty_, and have a lot of affordances and usability improvements over the ancient tools that can never be changed for the sake of compatibility. Rust and Go make this nicer, and are the languages de jour with good cli ecosystems and performance characteristics around them.
I genuinely do like most of my replacements. ripgrep for grep, eza for ls, zoxide for cd, fd for find, podman for docker, and a few more. Developer tooling is a rich and interesting space to be in, but there’s plenty of bandwagons I’m not getting on, like this or zellij for tmux, or jj for git.
Zoxide isn't a replacement for cd, but it is a wrapper for cd. It's the alternative for OG "z" (written in Bash I believe) and autojump (python) that were here for 20 years or so.
Basically, when tou type "cd some/subdir", these tools remember the frequency/recency of durectories you cd into, so at some point you can type "z sub" and they teleport you to "some/subdir" no matter what's your current working dir.
I love it and use it daily. Zoxide just has some nicer features than the alternatives (and maybe it's faster).
Build Systems for C(++) are a mess, no package manager often means git submodules. Whereas Rust is actually easy, just requiring an `cargo install`. Don't know about Zig though Zig hasn't really taken of just yet imo.
What @tkcranny said. They are better usability now and more sensible defaults. I also find them marginally faster.
I also using them as way of supporting them. Tmux is great and I have used for years. Zellij is not there yet but does some things better than tmux too.
