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

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

• 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

pacman (blaharch-repo)

install haj from the official blahArch repo for self-updating release via pacman, add this to the bottom of your /etc/pacman.conf:

[blaharch]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://asitos.github.io/blaharch-repo/$arch

then just sync and install normally (or update haj if it is already installed):

sudo pacman -Sy haj

cargo

requires rust + cargo to be installed:

cargo install 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.

command	aliases	action
tui	t	launch the interactive tui dashboard
install <pkg>	i	install one or more packages
remove <pkg>	rm, toss	remove packages & unneeded dependencies
update	up, sync	sync mirror databases
search <query>	s	search all remote sync databases (and aur)
show <pkg>	info	show local package details
list	ls	list explicitly installed packages
clean	c	scrub the package cache
orphan	o	detect orphaned dependencies
owns <file>	ow	find which local package owns a file
locate <file>	loc	search remote repos for a file name (pacman -F)
files <pkg>	lf	list all files installed by a package
load <file>	l	install a local package archive (.pkg.tar.zst)
fetch <pkg>	f	download a package to cache without installing
mark <pkg>	m	change the install reason of a package
diff	pn	interactively manage and merge .pacnew config files

options

• -a, --aur : restrict operations to the aur.
• -r, --repo : restrict operations to arch repositories.
• -y, --noconfirm : bypass all confirmation prompts.
• -n, --needed : do not reinstall up-to-date packages.
• -i, --ignore <pkg> : ignore a package upgrade (comma-separated: pkg1,pkg2).
• -c, --config <path> : specify an alternate pacman config file.
• --root <path> : specify an alternate installation root.
• -v, --verbose : enable verbose debug logging.
• -d, --dry-run : preview a command without modifying the system.
• -h, --help : display help information.
• -V, --version : show version info.

examples

launch the interactive dashboard:

haj tui 
# or
haj t

search for a package:

haj search neofetch
# or
haj s neofetch

sync repositories and install a package:

sudo haj sync
# or 
sudo haj up

sudo haj install htop cmatrix
or 
sudo haj i 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

for nerds

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 (BORING)

MIT license. see LICENSE for more information.