taproom is a cozy terminal user interface (TUI) for Homebrew. It provides a fast and fluid way to explore formulae and casks directly in your terminal.

⭐ Highlights

taproom does a few things faster and easier than the brew cli:

Search: searching in taproom gives results with all the details in real time; while using brew you need to run brew search then brew info on each package.
Dependencies: brew info shows direct dependencies; while taproom also shows all recusive dependencies that are not installed - this is helpful to understand what exactly would be installed as dependencies
- taproom also has clear indication for packages installed as dependencies vs installed explicitly
Dependents: brew uses --eval-all shows dependents that require the target package but it is a pretty slow command; taproom have this information available without additional data loading
Sorting: taproom supports sorting by popularity (90d installs) and size (disk spaced used)
Navigation: 'h' opens an app's home page and 'b' opens the brew formula page

✨ Features

Table View: Overview of all avaiable formulae and casks in Homebrew.
Detailed View: Get more info on any package, including its description, version, homepage, license, dependencies, and 90-day install count.
- Also shows dependencies recursively (only when the dependencies is not installed)
- Also shows dependents (which other packages depends on this one)
Search: Quickly find packages by keywords
- Default: match each keyword in either name or description
- Prefix n:: match the keyword only in name
- Prefix d:: match the keyword only in description
- Prefix t:: match the keyword only in tap
- Prefix h:: match the keyword only in home page
- Prefix -: turn into a negative keyword, can be combined with prefixes
  - For example: ebook -facebook - search for ebook but not facebook
Filtering: View all packages, or filter by:
- Formulae only
- Casks only
- Installed packages
- Outdated packages
- Packages you installed explicitly (not as dependencies)
Flexible Sorting: Sort packages alphabetically by name or by 90-day popularity.
Status Indicators: See at a glance which packages are installed, outdated, or pinned.
Execute brew commands: upgrade, install, uninstall, pin or unpin packages directly in the TUI.

🚀 Getting Started

Dependencies

A terminal emulator with a nerd font
du (MacOS builtin command)
brew Homebrew
gh Github CLI
- Optional, used for getting release info when --fetch-release flag is set

Install from pre-built binary

gromgit@ (Thank you!) maintains a formula:

brew install gromgit/brewtils/taproom

Or use eget:

eget hzqtc/taproom

Build from source

To build from source, follow these simple steps:

Build dependencies

Build

Navigate to the project directory.
Build the binary:
```
make
```
Run the application:
```
./taproom
```

🪄 Customization

The app's behavior can be further customized with command line flags:

--invalidate-cahce or -i in short: invalidate cache and re-download data from brew.sh
--fetch-release: fetch release information for installed packages. This flag enables displaying release date and 'r' key to open release page
- Note release information is only available when homebrew url or home page points to a github repo with releases
- About 60% packages would show release date and support 'r' to open release page with this flag enabled
- Requires gh (Github CLI) to be in the PATH
--hide-columns: hide and skip loading data for specified columns
- This can be helpful to further simplify the UI
- While all data loading is done in parallel, some may be slower than others. This flag can be used to skip loading certain data to speed up app load
--load-timer or -t in short: show a timer in the loading screen
--hide-help: hide the help text on the bottom of the app
--sort-column or -s in short: specify the column to sort by (this can still be changed in app with s and S keys)
--filters or -f in short: specify initial filters (can still be changed later in the app)

Run taproom -h to learn more about the command line flags.

🛠️ Built With

🔀 Alternatives

taproom is inspired by boldbrew but it's not a clone.

taproom has a different UI style
taproom supports casks
taproom supports sorting by different columns
taproom shows missing dependencies recursively (i.e. dependencies of dependencies)
taproom shows reverse dependencies (i.e. used by) that replaces an very slow brew uses <formula> --eval-all command
taproom shows the size of installed packages

README.md

taproom