sniffy

A terminal UI for watching and running Go tests. sniffy monitors your project for file changes and reruns tests automatically, with a sidebar for navigating test files and a live output panel.

Features

• Watches .go files for changes and reruns affected tests immediately
• Sidebar lists all _test.go files found in the project
• Navigate files with arrow keys or j/k — the output panel shows only that file's results
• Toggle files on/off with space to silence noisy or slow tests
• Runs tests per file using go test -v -run with extracted test function names, not the whole package
• Pass/fail state is reflected in color: green for passing, red for failing, blue for pending, gray for disabled
• Respects maxDepth to avoid descending into deeply nested directories

Installation

go install github.com/jwc20/sniffy/cmd/sniffy@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/jwc20/sniffy
cd sniffy
task build

The binary is placed in ./bin/sniffy.

Keybindings

Key	Action
↑ / k	Move cursor up
↓ / j	Move cursor down
space	Toggle selected file on/off
q / ctrl+c	Quit

How it works

On startup, sniffy:

1. Walks the given directories (up to maxDepth = 10) and finds all _test.go files
2. Parses each file to extract TestXxx function names
3. Runs all enabled tests immediately in parallel
4. Starts a filesystem watcher; when a .go file changes, only the tests in that package rerun

Tests are run as go test -v -run ^(TestFoo|TestBar)$ scoped to the functions in the changed file rather than the entire package.

Dependencies

• charm.land/bubbletea/v2 — TUI framework
• charm.land/lipgloss/v2 — terminal styling
• fsnotify/fsnotify — filesystem watcher
• fatih/color — colored log output

See also

• gotestyourself/gotestsum — the file watcher implementation is adapted from gotestsum
• lusingander/gotip
• sniffer