Rust Command Line Tool to Access Windows Features and Commands

My first attempt at a rust program is the winc (pronounced wink) or wince (Windows Command Entry) command line tool that simplifies access to common Windows features and programs. Beware that this morning I didn’t know the first thing about programming with rust; I only knew how to install it, as I had noted in the following blog post.

• Rust for Windows (Subsystem for Linux) – wslguy.net

This compiles and runs under both Windows and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). I had to install the free Microsoft Visual Studio C++ options to link the executable on Windows. Windows console/command prompt:

WSL Bash shell in Windows Terminal:

Without installing anything else, compared to my expectations from C#, the rust editing support in Visual Studio Community 2019 was relatively poor.

Visual Studio Code without third-party extensions may be a little faster, but does not seem much better.

Update 11.June.2021: Original code removed for brevity; follow the link to github at the end of this post for a rustier version with more features that could possibly be less defective. I have renamed the command to wink; wince is the name of the script that I use to build wink.

• GitHub – deliverystack/wink: wink rust command line tool to access Windows applications and features from cmd.exe and WSL bash.exe shells
• Anatomy of a Rust Program, Part I: Wink cargo.toml – rustapopoulos.com