What does it exactly do ?

Bacon watches the content of your source directories and launches cargo check or other commands on changes.

Watching and computations are done on background threads to prevent any blocking.

The screen isn't cleaned until the compilation is finished to prevent useful information from being replaced by the lines of an unfinished computation.

Errors and test failures are displayed before warnings because you usually want to fix them first.

Rendering is adapted to the dimensions of the terminal to ensure you get a proper usable report. And bacon manages rewrapping on resize.

Parallel bacon ?

It's perfectly OK to have several bacon running in paralle, and can be useful to check several compilation targets.

Similarly you don't have to stop bacon when you want to use cargo to build the application, or when you're just working on something else. You may have a dozen bacon running without problem.

Bacon is efficient and doesn't work when there's no notification.

Supported platforms

It works on all decent terminals on Linux, Max OSX and Windows.

Vim & Neovim support

(Neo)Vim is perfectly supported but you may have had a problem, depending on your installation, with bacon sometimes not recomputing on file changes.

The default write strategy of vim makes successive savings of the same file not always detectable by inotify.

A solution is to add this to your init.vim file:

set nowritebackup

This doesn't prevent vim from keeping copies during editions, it just changes the behavior of the write operation and has no practical downside.

Licences

Bacon is licenced under AGPL-3.0. You're free to use it to compile the Rust projects of your choice, even commercial.

The logo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Why "bacon" ?

• It's a background conpiler.
• It comes from France and, as you know, France is bacon.

It's just a name. You don't have to eat meat to use the software.