rmcl

Rusty MineCraft Launcher. or Rust MineCraft cLi. pick whichever sounds better to you.

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about

we all love TUIs. and we all know the official Minecraft launcher is not exactly a joy to use (performance wise; no hatespeech here). so here's rmcl, a fully featured Minecraft launcher that lives in your terminal. written in Rust.

it does everything you'd expect from a launcher.

features

Mod Loader	Supported
Vanilla	✅
Fabric	✅
Forge	✅
NeoForge	✅
Quilt	✅
LiteLoader	❌
Rift	❌

modpacks and accounts

Modrinth, MultiMC, and GTNH modpacks format is supported. Import it from a file, URL, or just the slug. Able to use multiple Microsoft accounts and offline accounts aswell.

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authentication

rmcl uses its own Microsoft client ID for Minecraft account authentication.

Authentication is performed through Microsoft’s official services.

installation

macOS / Linux

prebuilt archives are attached to each GitHub release.

# Homebrew
brew install objz/tap/rmcl

Windows

release builds include a .zip archive and an .msi. WinGet packages are submitted from release CI and become available after review.

# WinGet
winget install Objz.Rmcl

Arch Linux

# from source (release tarball)
paru -S rmcl

# prebuilt binary
paru -S rmcl-bin

# latest git
paru -S rmcl-git

Cargo

cargo install rmcl

from source

requires a Rust toolchain and a JDK (javac and jar on PATH).

git clone https://github.com/objz/rmcl.git
cd rmcl
cargo build --release

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where things live

config & data

settings, accounts, instances, and cached game metadata.

what	Linux	macOS	Windows
config (config.toml, theme.toml, accounts.json)	~/.config/rmcl/	~/Library/Application Support/rmcl/	%APPDATA%\rmcl\
instances	~/.local/share/rmcl/instances/	~/Library/Application Support/rmcl/instances/	%LOCALAPPDATA%\rmcl\instances\
metadata (versions, libraries, assets, loader profiles)	~/.local/share/rmcl/meta/	~/Library/Application Support/rmcl/meta/	%LOCALAPPDATA%\rmcl\meta\

each instance has an instance.json for its config and a .minecraft/ directory with the actual game files.

logs

launcher logs are per-session and contain rmcl's own output. instance launch logs capture game stdout/stderr per launch.

what	Linux	macOS	Windows
launcher logs	~/.cache/rmcl/	~/Library/Caches/rmcl/	%LOCALAPPDATA%\rmcl\
instance launch logs	<instances>/<name>/.minecraft/logs/launches/	same	same

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performance

the following measurements were taken from a release build on a Linux development system. they are intended as a practical reference, since terminal, window size, content count, and hardware all affect the result.

idle instance list

over a 60 second sample, the instance list used 497.81 ms of CPU time. that is about 0.83% of one CPU core. resident memory was 15.1 MiB.

idle mods list

with a populated mods list and its icons loaded, a 60 second sample used 664.77 ms of CPU time. that is about 1.11% of one CPU core. resident memory was 67.2 MiB, with a peak of 69.9 MiB.

scrolling mods list

continuously scrolling through the populated mods list used 1000.02 ms of CPU time over 30 seconds. that is about 3.33% of one CPU core.

In comparison, the Modrinth AppImage used approximately 14-30% of a CPU core and about 327 Mib of memory while browsing the mod list.

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themes

rmcl ships with 10 built-in themes:

catppuccin · dracula · nord · gruvbox · one-dark · solarized · tailwind · tokyo-night · rose-pine · terminal

you can create your own by dropping a TOML file in ~/.config/rmcl/theme/ and referencing it by name, or point to an absolute path.

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contributing

contributions are welcome. fork it, branch it, PR it. see CONTRIBUTING.md

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license

GPL-3.0. see LICENSE.

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