microfetch/README.md

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...

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)
  • Current Desktop (DE/WM/Compositor and display backend)
  • Memory Usage/Total Memory
  • Storage Usage/Total Storage (for / only)
  • Shell Colors
• Did I mention fast?
• Respects NO_COLOR spec

Motivation

Fastfetch, as its name indicates, a very fast fetch tool written in C, however, I am not interested in any of its additional features, such as customization, and I very much dislike the defaults. Microfetch is my response to this problem, a very fast fetch tool that you would normally write in Bash and put in your ~/.bashrc but actually really fast because it opts-out of all customization options provided by Fastfetch, and is written in Rust. Why? Because I can, and because I prefer Rust for "structured" Bash scripts.

I cannot re-iterate it enough, Microfetch is annoyingly fast.

Benchmarks

The performance may be sometimes influenced by hardware-specific race conditions, or even your kernel configuration meaning it may (at times) depend on your hardware. However, the overall trend appears to be less than 1.3ms on any modern (2015 and after) CPU that I own. Below are the benchmarks with Hyperfine on my desktop system. Please note that those benchmarks will not be always kept up to date, but I will try to update the numbers as I make Microfetch faster.

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative	Written by raf?
microfetch	1.0 ± 0.1	0.9	1.7	1.00	yes
fastfetch	48.6 ± 1.6	45.8	61.3	46.65 ± 4.75	no
pfetch	206.0 ± 4.5	198.0	241.4	197.50 ± 19.53	no
neofetch	689.1 ± 29.1	637.7	811.2	660.79 ± 69.56	no

As far as I'm concerned, Microfetch is significantly faster than every other fetch tool that I have tried. The only downsides of using Rust for the project (in exchange for speed and maintainability) is the slightly "bloated" dependency trees, and the increased build times. The latter is very easily mitigated with Nix's binary cache. Since Microfetch is already in Nixpkgs, you are recommended to use it to utilize the binary cache properly

Benchmarking Individual Functions

To benchmark individual functions, Criterion.rs is used. See Criterion's Getting Started Guide for details or just run cargo bench to benchmark all features of Microfetch.

Installation

Note

You will need a Nerdfonts patched font installed, and for your terminal emulator to support said font. Microfetch uses nerdfonts glyphs by default.

Microfetch is packaged in nixpkgs. It can be installed by adding pkgs.microfetch to your environment.systemPackages. Additionally, you can try out Microfetch in a Nix shell.

nix shell nixpkgs#microfetch

Or run it directly with nix run

nix run nixpkgs#microfetch

Non-Nix users will have to build Microfetch with cargo. It is not published anywhere but I imagine you can use cargo install --git to install it from source.

cargo install --git https://github.com/notashelf/microfetch.git

Microfetch is currently not available anywhere else. Though, does it really have to be?

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.

The Nix package allows passing patches in a streamlined manner by passing .overrideAttrs to the derivation.

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 if your changes are large.

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.

Thanks

Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to make pull requests or nag me in person about current issues. To list a few, special thanks to:

• @Nydragon - For packaging Microfetch in Nixpkgs
• @ErrorNoInternet - Performance improvements and code assistance
• @SoraTenshi - General tips and code improvements
• @bloxx12 - Performance improvements and benchmarking plots
• @sioodmy - Being cute
• @mewoocat - The awesome NixOS logo ASCII used in Microfetch

Additionally a big thank you to everyone who used, talked about or criticized Microfetch. I might have missed your name here, but you have my thanks.

License

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