/microfetch

Microscopic fetch script in Rust, for NixOS systems, with special emphasis on speed

Primary LanguageRustGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

https://deps.rs/repo/github/notashelf/microfetch

Microfetch

Stupidly simple, laughably fast fetch tool. Written in Rust for speed and ease of maintainability. Runs in a fraction of a millisecond and displays most of the nonsense you'd see posted on r/unixporn or other internet communities. Aims to replace fastfetch on my personal system, but probably not yours. Though, you are more than welcome to use it on your system: it's pretty fast...

latest demo

Features

  • Fast
  • Really fast
  • Minimal dependencies
  • Actually really fast
  • Cool NixOS logo (other, inferior, distros are not supported)
  • Reliable detection of following info:
    • Hostname/Username
    • Kernel
      • Name
      • Version
      • Architecture
    • Current shell (from $SHELL, trimmed if store path)
    • WM/Compositor and display backend
    • Memory Usage/Total Memory
    • Storage Usage/Total Storage (for / only)
    • Shell Colors
  • Did I mention fast?

Benchmarks

Microfetch's performance is mostly hardware-dependant, however, the overall trend seems to be < 2ms on any modern (2015 and after) CPU. Below are the benchmarks with Hyperfine on my desktop system.

Command Mean [ms] Min [ms] Max [ms] Relative
microfetch 1.3 ± 0.0 1.3 1.4 1.00
pfetch 254.2 ± 4.8 246.7 264.9 191.97 ± 7.10
neofetch 735.4 ± 9.5 721.1 752.8 555.48 ± 19.08
fastfetch 31.9 ± 0.8 30.8 33.8 24.08 ± 0.98

As far as I'm concerned, Microfetch is faster than almost every fetch tool there is. The only downside of using Rust is introducing more "bloated" dependency trees and increasing build times. The latter is easily mitigated with Nix's binary cache, though.

Customizing

You can't.

Why?

Customization, of any kind, is expensive: I could try reading environment variables, parse command-line arguments or read a configuration file but all of those increment execution time and resource consumption by a lot.

Really?

To be fair, you can customize Microfetch by... Well, patching it. It's not the best way per se, but it will be the only way that does not compromise on speed.

Contributing

I will, mostly, reject feature additions. This is not to say you should avoid them altogether, as you might have a really good idea worth discussing but as a general rule of thumb consider talking to me before creating a feature PR.

Contributions that help improve performance in specific areas of Microfetch are welcome. Though, prepare to be bombarded with questions.

Hacking

A Nix flake is provided. nix develop to get started. Direnv users may simply run direnv allow to get started.

Non-nix users will need cargo and gcc installed on their system, see Cargo.toml for available release profiles.

License

Microfetch is licensed under GPL3. See the license file for details.