A Better Way to Explore Rust Crates from the Terminal

I added cargo-seek to my Rust toolbox and discovered an excellent terminal-based way to explore the crate ecosystem. From searching for Burn to inspecting versions, features, dependencies, and documentation, cargo-seek turns crate discovery into a fast, interactive TUI experience—all without leaving the terminal

Discovering cargo-seek

As I continue building out my Rust development environment on Debian, I’ve been gradually collecting tools that make working with Cargo a little easier.

One of my latest discoveries is cargo-seek, an interactive terminal interface for searching and exploring Rust crates.

Normally, if I wanted to search the Rust ecosystem from the command line, I might use:

cargo search burn

That works perfectly well, but cargo-seek turns the process into something much more interactive.

After installing it, my first question was actually very simple:

Where did it go?

I checked with:

which cargo-seek

and Debian reported:

/home/lvydvy/.cargo/bin/cargo-seek

That was also a useful reminder about how my Rust environment is organized. Programs installed through Cargo normally end up in:

~/.cargo/bin/

Understanding the Cargo subcommand

The executable is called:

cargo-seek

but I don’t have to type its full path.

Cargo recognizes executables following the cargo-NAME convention as Cargo subcommands.

Therefore:

cargo-seek

becomes:

cargo seek

That is a small detail, but it’s one of those things that makes the Cargo ecosystem feel remarkably cohesive once you understand what’s happening.

I launched it with:

cargo seek

and suddenly my ordinary terminal became an interactive Rust crate browser.

It’s a TUI, not a desktop application

Initially, I was expecting cargo-seek to perhaps open another window.

Instead, cargo-seek runs directly inside the terminal as a TUI — Terminal User Interface.

The interface provides a search box, crate results, detailed package information and keyboard-driven navigation.

Its built-in help showed commands for searching, sorting, changing the search scope, selecting crates, adding dependencies, installing binary crates and opening documentation.

That immediately made cargo-seek feel like more than a prettier version of cargo search.

Putting it to a real test

Since I was already inside my Burn project:

~/Projects/burn-demo

I searched for:

burn

This was a perfect test because Burn was already part of the project.

cargo-seek returned a large collection of Burn-related crates and selected the main burn package.

The details panel identified Burn as a:

Flexible and Comprehensive Deep Learning Framework in Rust

Even better, I could see information such as the stable version, project version, license, Rust MSRV, features, downloads, documentation and repository information.

The interface also exposed the much larger Burn ecosystem.

Among the results were crates such as:

burn
burn-ndarray
burn-autodiff
burn-wgpu
burn-cuda
burn-fusion
burn-nn
burn-optim
burn-train
burn-backend
burn-store
burn-tch
burn-cpu
burn-flex
burn-vision
burn-tensor
burn-core

Seeing these together gave me a much better visual sense of how Burn itself is constructed.

Instead of thinking of Burn as one giant Rust library, I could see its modular ecosystem of tensor, neural-network, training, GPU, CPU and backend components.

The + was especially useful

There was also a small but important indicator next to the main Burn result:

+ burn

That told me Burn was already added to my current project.

That makes cargo-seek particularly useful when launched inside an existing Rust project.

It’s not merely answering:

“What crates exist?”

It’s also helping answer:

“What am I already using in this project?”

That distinction makes the program considerably more useful to me.

Searching and managing crates from one place

The built-in keyboard commands also reveal what cargo-seek is designed to do.

From the results, I can navigate with the arrow keys and perform operations such as adding a crate to the project, removing one, installing binary crates, uninstalling them and opening documentation.

So the workflow becomes something like:

Rust Project
     │
     ▼
 cargo seek
     │
     ├── Search crates
     ├── Examine versions
     ├── Examine features
     ├── See installed/project status
     ├── Add dependencies
     ├── Install binaries
     └── Open documentation

That’s considerably more convenient than remembering a collection of commands while simultaneously searching crates.io and documentation in a browser.

Another piece of my Rust toolbox

My Rust environment is gradually becoming more than simply rustc and cargo.

There are the fundamental tools:

rustup
rustc
cargo
rustfmt
clippy

Then there are specialized Cargo utilities.

cargo-seek now has a place in that second group.

I don’t expect it to replace Cargo itself—or even the crates.io website. What it gives me is another way to explore the Rust ecosystem without leaving the terminal.

And that’s exactly the kind of utility I enjoy discovering.

An unexpected connection to Burn

There was something particularly satisfying about testing cargo-seek with Burn.

I had recently created:

~/Projects/burn-demo

and successfully compiled Burn 0.21.0 with its WGPU backend. My first Burn program performed a simple tensor operation and reported the backend as:

fusion<cubecl<wgpu<wgsl>>>

So when I launched cargo-seek from that same directory and searched for Burn, I wasn’t looking at some random crate.

I was exploring the dependencies of something I’d already compiled and run myself.

That’s exactly how I like learning Linux and programming tools: install something, use it, inspect it, understand where it lives, and then connect it to the other pieces I’ve already learned.

And now I have another command to remember:

cargo seek

🦀

Why I installed cargo-seek

I’d include a small highlighted section in the article:

Why install it?
cargo-seek gives me an interactive way to discover and investigate Rust crates directly from my terminal. I can search the ecosystem, inspect crate versions and features, see whether a dependency is already part of my project, access documentation, and perform common crate-management tasks without constantly switching between terminal commands and browser tabs.