Rust Dev Toolkit

Comprehensive developer toolkit for building, testing, and managing Rust projects in Visual Studio Code.

Overview

Rust Dev Toolkit streamlines everyday Rust workflows by unifying Cargo commands, Crates.io package management, macro expansion, toolchain inspection, and a searchable language cheat sheet into a cohesive interface.

Features

Cargo Task Explorer

A dedicated Sidebar view in the Activity Bar for running essential Cargo commands with one click:

• Build & Run: cargo check, cargo build, cargo run, cargo doc
• Quality & Linting: cargo test, cargo clippy, cargo clippy --fix, cargo fmt
• Dependencies: Crates.io search, cargo update, cargo tree
• Advanced Tools: cargo expand, cargo bench, cargo clean

Crates.io Dependency Assistant

• Search the Crates.io registry directly from the Command Palette or Sidebar.
• View version metadata, description, and total download count.
• Add dependencies via cargo add or copy configuration lines directly to clipboard.
• Direct links to Docs.rs documentation.

Interactive Rust Cheat Sheet

Searchable reference panel covering essential idioms and patterns:

• Error Handling: Result<T, E>, ? operator propagation, thiserror, anyhow.
• Concurrency & Async: Arc<Mutex<T>> state sharing, Tokio task spawning, MPSC channels.
• Memory & Pointers: Box<T>, Rc<RefCell<T>>, Lifetimes.
• Traits & Iterators: Default methods, combinator pipelines.
• Instant Copy and Insert into Editor actions.

Macro Expansion Viewer

• Run cargo expand on active source files to inspect generated code from derive macros and procedural macros in a side-by-side virtual editor with syntax highlighting.

Toolchain Status Indicator

• Displays the active rustc compiler version and target in the status bar with quick access to common workflows.

Commands

Extension Settings

Requirements

• Rust toolchain (rustc and cargo installed via rustup.rs).
• (Optional) cargo-expand (cargo install cargo-expand) for macro expansion features.

License

MIT