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Show HN: ut – Rust based CLI utilities for devs and IT

(github.com)
170 points ksdme9 | 1 comments | 05 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source

Hey HN,

I find myself reaching for tools like it-tools.tech or other random sites every now and then during development or debugging. So, I built a toolkit with a sane and simple CLI interface for most of those tools.

For the curious and lazy, at the moment, ut has tools for,

- Encoding: base64 (encode, decode), url (encode, decode)

- Hashing: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512

- Data Generation: uuid (v1, v3, v4, v5), token, lorem, random

- Text Processing: case (lower, upper, camel, title, constant, header, sentence, snake), pretty-print, diff

- Development Tools: calc, json (builder), regex, datetime

- Web & Network: http (status), serve, qr

- Color & Design: color (convert)

- Reference: unicode

For full disclosure, parts of the toolkit were built with Claude Code (I wanted to use this as an opportunity to play with it more). Feel free to open feature requests and/or contribute.

Show context
guessmyname ◴[05 Oct 25 18:58 UTC] No.45484198[source]▶
Why is everything in the same binary? Why not multiple binaries, one for each function? That way people can install only the ones they need, a-la Unix tools: do only one thing and do it well.

I also have the exact same tools but written in Go. Rust would be a nice upgrade (lower footprint) but to keep them all in the same binary is a bit silly.

replies(6): >>45484266 #>>45484273 #>>45484389 #>>45484480 #>>45484962 #>>45484977 #
teiferer ◴[05 Oct 25 19:32 UTC] No.45484480[source]▶
Also, lots of the ut functions already exist as decades old unix tools.
replies(1): >>45484650 #
geraldcombs ◴[05 Oct 25 19:53 UTC] No.45484650[source]▶
Those tools either don't ship with, or exist in wildly different forms on Windows. It's particularly bad for curl, which might be the real curl.se curl or Microsoft's confusingly-named Powershell alias.

I could definitely see using this in a cross-platform build or installation environment.

replies(1): >>45484943 #
rauli_ ◴[05 Oct 25 20:27 UTC] No.45484943[source]▶
Windows and *nix systems are often used for very different things so I don't understand why there would be need for some kind of universal superbinary. And thanks to WSL you can already get GNU coretools running in Windows anyways.
replies(1): >>45485355 #
geraldcombs ◴[05 Oct 25 21:16 UTC] No.45485355[source]▶
I lead a large-ish open source software project. We have developers that need to build on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's useful to be able to get everyone bootstrapped with as few steps as possible and with as few dependencies as possible. For our uses CMake works well as a universal superbinary, but I'm always on the lookout for tools that can reduce developer friction.
replies(1): >>45494734 #
1. teiferer ◴[06 Oct 25 18:43 UTC] No.45494734[source]▶
Gerald Combs of Wireshark? Wow, thanks for all your hard work!