Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Hunter – Lag-free terminal file browser in Rust

The fastest file manager in the galaxy! Contribute to rabite0/hunter development by creating an account on GitHub.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Hunter – Lag-free terminal file browser in Rust launched in 2019; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust▲597

   A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…

   2025 · desktopdocs.com · its alternatives →

2. 2
   tere – A Faster Alternative to cd+ls▲378

   Hi HN! I wrote a small program to browse folders in the terminal. The main inspiration was type-ahead search in GUI file managers. There exist several programs that are similar (see the listing in the README), but none of them do it quite the way I like, and often they have a very complex UI and a ton of features. I tried to make something that is obvious how to use and gets out of your way. (I also wanted an excuse to learn Rust.) Let me know what you think!

   2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking▲311

   I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…

   Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Zaplib – Speed up your webapp with Rust+Wasm▲175

   2022 · zaplib.com · its alternatives →

5. 5
   WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds▲154

   Hey HN, I’m Surya and I’m excited to show you WarpBuild! WarpBuild provides fast, secure `x86-64` and `arm64` Github actions runners. This speeds up your workloads by 30%, at half the cost, and takes ~2mins to get started. We’ve been seeing pretty good results since we opened up signups a week ago and I’ve shared some numbers publicly here [1]. Currently, we support linux runners for Github organizations (not personal accounts) and MacOS support is coming soon (~Jan). The way the runners work is deceptively simple: Runners are assigned to hardware that is ideal for build workloads with fast…

   2023 · warpbuild.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Fleet▲87

   The blazing fast build tool for Rust

   2022 · fleet.rs · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Rusteerio by Context.dev▲71

   Keep your Cheerio code. Make it faster.

   4d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter▲97

   Linux filesystem defragger written in Rust and Qt Quick/Kirigami - gbin/defragger

   Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

9. 9
   Second State VM▲78

   High performance secure & portable Rust functions in Node.js

   2020 · secondstate.io · its alternatives →

10. 10
    I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process▲113

    allocscope - a memory tracking tool. Contribute to matt-kimball/allocscope development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

11. 11
    Fast `git status` (git core.fsmonitor in Rust)▲52

    A fast git core.fsmonitor hook written in Rust. Contribute to jgavris/rs-git-fsmonitor development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

12. 12
    t-rec▲80

    Blazingly fast terminal recorder generates animated gifs

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    WolfStack – Proxmox-like server management in a single Rust binary▲32

    WolfStack folds Portainer, Uptime Kuma, Ansible, and Cockpit into a single Rust binary, and integrates with Proxmox and Tailscale. Manage Docker, LXC, VMs, networking, storage, backups, and status pages from one dashboard.

    Mar 2026 · wolfscale.org · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Highly cost-efficient search engine in Rust▲61

    Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability. Contribute to quickwit-oss/quickwit development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

15. 15
    Rqbit – bittorent CLI and desktop app written in Rust▲78

    A bittorrent client in Rust. Contribute to ikatson/rqbit development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

16. 16
    A minimal working Rust / SDL2 / WASM browser game▲82

    "Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser▲95

    I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch. The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

18. 18AC
    Asdf Clone Written in Rust▲79

    I think that asdf (https://asdf-vm.com) was a great idea for a project. It helps consolidate installing and running different programming languages into a similar UX. It also is built with a plugin interface that makes it easy to build support for new languages. However it is so slow. I was just testing `node -v` and it was taking ~900ms. That kind of overhead is completely unusable. My shell prompt uses runtimes inside of it for various things so this effectively makes every command take multiple seconds to complete. So I rebuilt it in Rust but using the same plugin ecosystem so…

    2023 · its alternatives →

19. 19
    rhun▲59

    A small, fast code editor written in assembly

    23d ago · rhun.app · its alternatives →

20. 20
    I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use▲68

    Hello! I got quite some feedback on a web server I'm building, so I'm rewriting the server to be faster and easier to use. I (and maybe some other contributors?) have optimized the web server performance, especially for static file serving and reverse proxying (the last use case I optimized for very recently). I also picked a different configuration format and specification, what I believe is easier to write. Automatic TLS is also enabled by default out of the box, you don't need to even enable it manually, like it was in the original server I was building. Yesterday, I released the first…

    2025 · ferron.sh · its alternatives →

21. 21
    SquirrelDisk▲69

    Fast and open source disk usage analysis tool

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Cross-platform dotfiles manager written in Rust▲21

    ⚡ A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager. Contribute to Shemnei/punktf development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23SS
    SSVM – Speed up your Node.js apps with Rust and WebAssembly▲5

    Raw performance (the lack of) is always a contentious point for JavaScript, especially in our post-Moore era of computing. Node.js gets around this issue through extensive of use of native libraries and modules written in C, including the V8 JS engine itself. But as application developers, how do YOU create high performance functions? Write in C and run as a NAPI module? Write in Rust and run as a V8 wasm? Well, there is another (better and faster) way now! The SSVM is a fully featured WebAssembly VM that is optimized for server-side applications.…

    2020 · its alternatives →

24. 24HF
    Hurry – Fast Rust build caching▲11

    Hey HN, we’re Eliza and Xin. We’re working on Hurry, an open source drop-in tool that adds distributed build caching to Cargo with (almost) zero configuration. Wherever you run cargo build, you can run hurry cargo build instead, and expect around 2-5x (our best benchmark is 22x) faster builds. We built this because we were dissatisfied with the current build caching options available for Rust. Buck and Bazel require learning a new tool. GitHub Actions and swatinem are too coarse-grained (either the whole cache hits, or none of it does) and finicky to debug, and cargo-chef and Docker layer…

    Dec 2025 · hurry.build · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →