Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Ken Tobias edited this page Sep 30, 2026 · 9 revisions

retch

retch is a fast, feature-rich system information fetcher written in Rust — a Fastfetch-style tool that displays your OS, hardware, and software info next to a distro logo, tuned to be faster than the tools it's compared against.

Vibe coded

This project is entirely vibe coded — every line was written by AI (Grok and Gemini) with a human directing at a high level. The code compiles, the tests pass, and the tool works, but it has not been reviewed by an experienced systems engineer.

Real programmers are welcome. If you spot something wrong, fragile, or just un-idiomatic, please open an issue or a PR — your expertise is exactly what this project needs.

What is retch?

retch exists to answer the same question as neofetch and fastfetch: "what does this machine look like?" — OS, kernel, CPU/GPU, memory, disks, network, and dozens of other fields, rendered next to your distro's logo. neofetch is no longer maintained; fastfetch is the current standard. retch is a from-scratch Rust implementation built around a concurrent fetch pipeline (see How It Works) that targets — and tracks via continuous benchmarking — beating fastfetch's runtime, while adding native EDID display parsing, a dedicated --full diagnostic mode, and a TOML config engine with CLI/config merge logic.

Key features

  • Concurrent fetch pipeline: scoped-thread parallelism for slow queries (GPU, packages, network, displays, audio, Bluetooth) — see How It Works
  • Four output modes: --short / standard / --long / --full, each a strict superset of the one before it
  • Cross-platform: first-class Linux, macOS, and Windows support
  • Rich graphics: native Kitty/iTerm2/Sixel inline image logos, falling back to Chafa (Unicode) or colored ASCII art
  • Flexible theming: built-in Catppuccin/Solarized/neutral/dark/light themes plus full hex-code custom overrides — see Configuration & Theming
  • Config engine: CLI flags and config.toml merge seamlessly (see Configuration & Theming for where it lives on each platform)

Wiki pages

Page What it covers
Getting Started Install, quick start, shell completions
How It Works Concurrent fetch pipeline, output-mode strata, workspace layout
Configuration and Theming Config file, all config.toml keys, themes
Troubleshooting Common problems and fixes
Compared to fastfetch and neofetch Where retch and fastfetch differ, and real-hardware benchmarks
Workspace Architecture Cargo workspace / crate layout in depth
Development Setup Building, testing, benchmarking, the Pre-PR gate

Also see the Continuous Performance Benchmarks dashboard — historical retch vs. fastfetch timing, tracked on every merge to main.

Quick start

cargo install retch-cli
retch

That's it — no config required. cargo install installs the binary only; see Getting Started for the just recipes that also install the man page and shell completions, for other install methods (AUR, COPR, Homebrew, Nix), and Configuration & Theming to customize fields and colors.

Clone this wiki locally