haj

fast, quiet, beautiful package management for BlahArch. (and yes, it is named after the ikea shark. all hail blahaj. 🦈)

haj is a modern, memory-safe wrapper for pacman written in rust. It replaces arch's notoriously loud and verbose terminal output with the clean, minimalistic aesthetic of modern package managers like cargo and bun, without compromising on speed or safety. also comes with love from the supreme plushie shark.

features

what's new in v0.2.0: the tui dashboard

haj now features a blazing-fast, interactive tui powered by ratatui. run haj tui to access:

• real-time search: press / or f to instantly filter all sync repository packages natively via libalpm.
• live commands popups: haj streams native pacman execution logs directly into floating, minimalist UI panels with razor-thin progress bars.
• the orphan sweeper: press c on the dashboard to instantly detect and vaporize unneeded dependencies (pacman -Rns) and reclaim disk space.
• 3d rotating blahaj (best): a fully 3D, spinning ascii art shark rendered natively via display3d.

cli features

• the cargo/bun aesthetic: no more jagged progress bars or walls of text. haj parses pacman output streams in real-time, displaying a single, elegant progress spinner and clean transaction summaries.
• native alpm engine: haj uses alpm.rs (c bindings for libalpm) to query your local and sync databases directly in memory.
• blazing fast orphan detection: instead of parsing text scripts, haj orphan traverses the true alpm directed acyclic graph (dag) to find unused dependencies in microseconds.
• deadlock-free concurrency: built on tokio, haj safely drops database locks before handing state-mutation over to pacman, guaranteeing zero lockfile collisions.
• safe dry run: Includes a built-in --dry-run flag to preview commands without touching your system.

working

haj is completely transparent and relies entirely on standard arch linux infrastructure:

1. reads (search, show, orphan) are done natively via libalpm bindings for maximum performance.
2. writes (install, remove, update, clean) are handed off securely to standard pacman subprocesses (pacman -S, pacman -Rs, etc.). haj intercepts the stdout/stderr streams via pseudo-terminals (pty), filters out the verbose noise, applies color formatting, and pipes the cleaned data to your screen in real-time.

installation

aur

you can install haj using your favorite aur helper:

yay -S haj
# or
paru -S haj

from source

requires the rust toolchain (cargo).

git clone https://github.com/asitos/haj.git
cd haj
cargo build --release

# install the binary to your system path
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/haj /usr/bin/haj

usage & commands

haj provides highly aliased commands for a faster typing experience.

global flags

• -d, --dry-run : preview a command without modifying the system.
• -v, --verbose : enable debug logging.
• -h, --help : print help information.
• -V, --version : print version information.

examples

launch the interactive dashboard:

haj tui 
# or
haj t

search for a package:

haj search neofetch

sync repositories and install a package:

sudo haj sync
sudo haj install htop cmatrix

safely preview removing a package without actually removing it:

haj -d toss firefox

configuration

haj works perfectly out of the box, but can be customized globally by creating a config file at ~/.config/haj/config.toml. It uses the TOML format.

# ~/.config/haj/config.toml

[general]
animations = true
color = "auto"
verbose = false

more config options are currently under work

architecture & technical details

haj is built with a focus on memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, and concurrent execution.

• asynchronous pty parsing: uses tokio to spawn non-blocking pseudo-terminals, capturing and formatting pacman's c-level standard streams in real-time without deadlocking background workers.
• ffi & memory safety: utilizes alpm.rs to interface with arch linux's libalpm. database locks are explicitly managed and safely dropped from memory before handing state mutation over to external processes.
• dag traversal: the orphan detection engine completely avoids bash scripting, instead traversing the system's directed acyclic graph (dag) directly in memory via c-bindings to calculate unneeded dependencies in microseconds.

license

MIT license. see LICENSE for more information.