lc

This kind of thing should probably be generalized so that any new parameter can be seamlessly woven into your `ls-like` reports. https://github.com/c-blake/lc/blob/master/extensions/fe1 does `du` (like your example) as a f)ormat e)xtension, but you could use `ffprobe` to do the run-time in hours:minutes:seconds for media files (or maybe 0sec for non-media) or number of git commits or age of last VC commit as an extra timestamp or numerous other things.

It's also a whole other tool and in Nim to boot, but https://github.com/c-blake/lc allows you to group "dot-directories" before "dot-files" before "non-dot directories" before non-dot files. There might be enough other new functionality such as abbreviation or multi-attribute colorization schemes to motivate learning a new tool. E.g., neither "dot-ness" nor "directory-ness" in the above is hard-coded. They could be any other convenient elements of the typology / taxonomy.

https://github.com/c-blake/lc in Nim might interest someone interested in a latterday 'ls'. The screenshots should probably show underlined hard-links or italicized symlinks or other examples of "multi-file-attribute" -to- "multi-text-attribute" mapping. That kind of multi-ness seems generally neglected in this report generation space.

I don't know about all your other questions, and I realize your post was more about "why Rust?" rather than "why not Nim?", but that said the https://github.com/c-blake/cligen Nim CLI framework seems much lower effort / ceremony than even Rust's `argh` and is just about as old as `clap` (both cligen & clap started 8 years ago in 2015 - Rust argh is much newer). There are over 50 CLI utilities in Nim at https://github.com/c-blake/bu, many of which do something novel rather than just "re-doing ls/find/cat with a twist". While they are really more "ls/ps construction toolkits" with some default configs to get people going, I think https://github.com/c-blake/lc and https://github.com/c-blake/procs are nicer than Rust alternatives. I mention these since you seem interested in such tools.