If you’ve ever had a chance to “nerd out” with me much I’ve probably told you about at least one TUI that I use to make my daily work life easier. Some of my favorites include htop, tig, tmux (not sure if tmux counts), etc..
Lately I’ve been finding myself using Kubernetes/OpenShift much more and I have often thought to myself I wish a nice TUI existed to get in and navigate resources in a Kubernetes environment. The various web interfaces are nice and comprehensive, and the CLI is awesome too, but each of them are too far on the fringes of what I’ll define as my sweet spot for discoverability vs speed vs power. A well designed TUI sits right in the middle and makes me feel right at home.
Enter K9s, described as providing
“a terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters”. This is
precisely the tool I’ve been looking for. The primary interface for
the tool is using : and typing in the name of an object type (like
deployments). Then all of that type of resource will be shown. You can
search within the list with / and press Enter to drill down
further. You can also press Ctrl-a to bring up the list of available
resource types and use xray mode with :xray deployments.
Check out the quick demo video below to see just a short bit of what
k9s has to offer: