brew-potato

A terminal UI for managing Homebrew packages, built with Bubble Tea.

Why

brew list dumps everything: your packages, their dependencies, transitive dependencies, all tangled together. There's no built-in way to see what you actually installed.

I knew the alternatives. Nix exists. There's even a Homebrew rewrite in Rust (zerobrew). I tried them, forgot about them, and went back to brew.

So I built this: show only user-installed packages, nothing else. I was also learning Go and needed a real project, not another todo app.

What it does

Full-screen TUI with a rounded table border and styled header and footer. Lists your user-installed Homebrew formulae with install dates. Uninstall runs async with a live spinner; the row turns red in place, no view flicker.

If brew isn't available, it tells you cleanly instead of dumping a stack trace on you.

Built With

Library	Purpose
Bubble Tea	TUI framework (Elm architecture)
Bubbles	Table and spinner components
Lip Gloss	Styles and layout

Requirements

• Go 1.21+
• Homebrew

Run

go mod tidy
go run .

Build

go build -o brew-potato .
./brew-potato

Project Structure

brew-ui/
├── main.go                 # entry point
├── internal/
│   ├── brew/
│   │   └── brew.go         # brew CLI wrapper & data types
│   └── ui/
│       ├── model.go        # Bubble Tea model, Init, Update
│       ├── view.go         # View rendering
│       └── styles.go       # lipgloss styles & table theme
├── go.mod
└── go.sum

Next Steps

GoReleaser can publish brew-potato as an actual Homebrew formula so anyone can install it with brew install. It handles cross-compilation, GitHub release assets, and writing the formula to a tap repo automatically.

Keybindings

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Navigate packages
d	Uninstall selected
?	Show credits
q	Quit

License

Do what every you want with it.