etchr

A fast, safe, and modular disk imaging utility.

Tired of cryptic `dd` commands? Worried you'll accidentally wipe your system drive?
etchr is a modern, reliable tool that makes flashing SD cards and USB drives simple and safe. It is built as a modular workspace containing a core library and a command-line front-end.

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This repository is a Cargo workspace containing the following crates:

• etchr: A fast, safe, and interactive CLI for flashing disk images. This is the crate most users will interact with.
• etchr-core: The core, UI-agnostic library for etchr. It provides the business logic for device discovery, reading, and writing, and can be used by any front-end.

🚀 Installation & Usage

For most users, you will want to install and use the command-line application, etchr.

Please see the etchr README for detailed installation and usage instructions.

A quick-start for installation is:

cargo install etchr

✨ Project Goals

• Modularity: The core logic is completely decoupled from the UI, allowing for different front-ends (CLI, GUI) to be built on the same foundation.
• Safety: The primary goal is to prevent users from accidentally wiping the wrong disk. The interactive-only device selection is a key part of this.
• Performance: Use unbuffered, direct I/O where possible to achieve the best possible speeds.
• Cross-Platform: The architecture is designed to support multiple operating systems (Linux, Windows, macOS) by abstracting platform-specific code into a dedicated layer.

🗺️ Roadmap

• Refactor into a core library and a cli application.
• Add full implementation for Windows device discovery.
• Add implementation for macOS device discovery.
• Add a etchr-gui crate using a framework like Tauri or Iced.
• Smarter reading (e.g., only reading partitions, not the whole empty disk).
• Multi-write: Flashing one image to multiple devices at once.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! This project is structured as a workspace. Please make sure your changes are made in the appropriate crate.

• For changes to the core logic (reading, writing, verification, platform support), please contribute to etchr-core.
• For changes to the command-line interface (parsing, prompts, output), please contribute to etchr.

Feel free to open an issue or start a discussion.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.