What is bush?

Bush is a command line tool written in Rust that displays a project's directory structure as a tree, similar to the classic tree command found on most systems. The main difference is that bush understands ignore files: it automatically respects .gitignore.dockerignore.npmignore.eslintignore.prettierignore, and .ignore rules, so what you see matches what actually matters in a project instead of showing every cached file, build artifact, or vendor directory nobody cares about. Under the hood it uses the same ignore handling library, the ignore crate, that powers ripgrep and fd, two well known fast command line tools. That means the ignore rules are parsed correctly and traversal stays fast even on large codebases. Beyond the basic tree view, bush offers a wide range of display options. You can filter to show only directories, limit how many levels deep it goes, show file sizes, modification timestamps, and Unix style permissions, sort results by name, size, or modification time, and filter by filename pattern using globs. Output can be rendered as a tree, or as JSON, HTML, or XML, which makes it easy to pipe results into other tools or scripts. A color palette distinguishes directories, executables, archives, images, source code files, and config files at a glance. Settings can live in a .bush JSON config file, which bush looks for at several locations with a defined order of precedence: command line flags first, then a local config file walked up from the target directory, then user and system config locations, then built in defaults. Unknown keys in a config file produce a clear error, so typos are caught early rather than silently ignored. To install it, you clone the repository, build it with cargo, and symlink or copy the resulting binary into a folder on your path. The project includes around 275 tests. It is licensed under MIT, so you are free to use, modify, and distribute it with minimal restriction.