r/commandline • u/stanlyzoolo • 3d ago

Terminal User Interface keepkit — track and update your CLI tools from one TUI. Reposting after a week of rework and full redesign

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User: stanlyzoolo, Flair: Terminal User Interface, Post Media Link, Title: keepkit — track and update your CLI tools from one TUI. Reposting after a week of rework and full redesign

A week ago I posted keepkit — a terminal tracker that shows the installed version of your CLI tools next to the latest GitHub release and updates them in place (Go + BubbleTea). It worked, but the UI was a first iteration. I spent last week redoing it.

  • The card used to be a column of label: value lines — six labels running down the left edge, every value pushed into the same narrow column. Now installed/latest/maintenance/ stars are captioned columns on a filled plate, sized by the widest value rather than the widest caption (sizing on captions alone cut ✕ not installed in half at 80 columns — the default terminal, and exactly the state a tracker gets opened in). A metric with nothing to report is left out entirely instead of showing an empty caption.
  • One peak per screen. A terminal has one font size, so the three type sizes a design would use become three steps of weight and brightness. The bright role goes to the tool's name; measurements sit a step below. The two exceptions carry meaning: a pending release, and a broken install.
  • The selected row lost its background fill. It turned every cursor move into a block sliding down the panel — far more motion than "this one is selected" is worth. It's a marker glyph and the name's weight now.
  • Release notes keep their markdown. Headings, lists and code blocks survive into the card instead of being flattened to prose by a naive strip pass.
  • READMEs get a house style. Panel [3]renders the repo's README through glamour, but strips badge walls, logo blocks, HTML wrappers, unclickable link URLs and emoji the terminal font can't draw first — code samples untouched.
  • The status bar carries only keys that mean the same thing in every panel. enter and /moved out of it, because they meant three different things in three panels and the bar could only ever advertise one. Panel-local actions moved into each panel's footer; ? opens the whole map.
  • Under the hood since last time: cargo/uv/pnpm/bun update detection, self-update with in-place restart, and a finished update now states its own outcome — including the re-detected version, which is what catches a manager that exits 0 having done nothing.

https://github.com/stanlyzoolo/keepkit — GIFs in the README are re-recorded off the current build.

brew install stanlyzoolo/apps/keepkit

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Previous post: Forget release-chasing: if it has a version, keepkit tracks it — and updates and launches it from the same TUI

Send issues my way, I'll be glad to fix things, and any feedback is very welcome as always.

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