Bacon is a background code checker for Rust projects that runs continuously alongside your editor to notify you of compilation errors, warnings, and test failures.
Bacon solves the friction of manually running cargo check, clippy, and tests during development. It watches your code and automatically re-runs checks in the background, displaying results in a terminal interface. The tool is designed for minimal interaction—you launch it once and let it run, switching between different job types with single keystrokes. You can run the default check job, switch to clippy with 'c', run tests with 't', or trigger custom jobs you define in a bacon.toml configuration file.
Bacon suits developers who want continuous feedback without breaking their editor workflow. It works well for any Rust project where you want to catch errors and warnings as you code. The tool supports checking individual targets or all targets at once, running tests with the ability to filter to failing tests, and defining custom cargo commands. If you use nextest for parallel test execution, bacon integrates with that as well.
The project shows consistent maintenance with regular updates addressing user-reported issues and feature requests. Development includes responsiveness to bug reports and incorporation of community feedback into the tool's behavior and configuration options. The maintainer actively documents features and keeps the bacon.toml configuration format backward compatible across releases, ensuring users do not lose settings when updating.
