taproom

taproom is featured as "Tool of the Week" (July 15, 2025) on Terminal Trove, the $HOME of all things in the terminal.

taproom

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 recursive dependencies that are not installed - this is helpful to understand what exactly would be installed as dependencies
  • taproom also has a 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 has this information available without additional data loading
• Sorting: taproom supports sorting by popularity (90d installs) and size (disk space used)
• Navigation: 'h' opens an app's home page and 'b' opens the brew formula page

✨ Features

• Table View: Overview of all available 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 are not installed)
  • Also shows dependents (which other packages depend 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 the name
  • Prefix d:: match the keyword only in description
  • Prefix t:: match the keyword only in tap
  • Prefix h:: match the keyword only in the 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  • Outdated packages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• Status Indicators: See at a glance which packages are installed, outdated, or pinned.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

brew install taproom

Or use eget:

eget hzqtc/taproom

Build from source

To build from source, follow these simple steps:

Build dependencies

• Go

Build

1. Navigate to the project directory.
2. Build the binary:
   bash复制

   make

3. Run the application:
   bash复制

   ./taproom

Customization

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

• --invalidate-cache 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 the release date and the 'r' key to open the release page
  • Note: release information is only available when the homebrew URL or home page points to a GitHub repo with releases
  • About 60% packages would show the release date and support 'r' to open the 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 at 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)
• --theme: color theme for light/dark terminal backgrounds (auto, light, dark; default: auto)
  • By default, taproom auto-detects your terminal's background color and picks a matching palette
  • Use --theme light or --theme dark to override if auto-detection doesn't work for your terminal

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

️ Built With

• Go
• Bubble Tea
• Bubbles
• Lip Gloss

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 a very slow brew uses --eval-all command
• taproom shows the size of installed packages

✨ Star History