🍺 Brew Explorer

A beautiful terminal UI for exploring and managing your Homebrew packages with ease.

What is Brew Explorer?

You know how after some time you run brew list and see a bunch of packages you have no idea about? Me too! It's frustrating to figure out what those packages do without copy/pasting their names into brew.sh and only then discovering what they're good for.

That's why I created Brew Explorer - a little app that makes it easy to understand what formulaes and casks you have installed on your system.
Plus, you can quickly uninstall old useless things and update whatever was left behind - all from within the same interface!

But why stop at Homebrew? If you're a Mac user, you likely have apps from the Mac App Store too. That's where mas comes in — a brilliant command-line interface for the Mac App Store that brings it under the same terminal-native workflow. Brew Explorer integrates with mas to give you a unified view of your Mac software, whether it came from Homebrew or the App Store — though it works perfectly fine without it too.

Screenshots

Loading Screen

Main Screen

Search and Uninstall

Features

✨ Appealing TUI - Clean, intuitive terminal interface with ASCII art
🔍 Search functionality - Quickly find packages by name
📦 Package details - View descriptions, homepages, versions, and more
🔄 Update packages - Update outdated packages with a single keystroke
🗑️ Uninstall packages - Remove packages you no longer need
🎨 Color-coded status - Green for up-to-date, red for outdated packages
⚡ Fast navigation - Multi-column layout for efficient browsing
🚀 Auto-sync - Runs brew update on startup for fresh package information
🍎 Mac App Store support - Browse and manage App Store apps via mas

Installation

Prerequisites

• macOS (Homebrew is macOS-specific)
• Homebrew installed
• mas (brew install mas) — optional, enables Mac App Store integration

Steps

brew tap cosmincatalin/tap
brew install brew-explorer

Navigation

• ↑/↓ or k/j - Move up/down in the package list (Vim-style)
• ←/→ or h/l - Move left/right between columns (Vim-style)
• PgUp/PgDn - Jump by pages
• Home/End - Jump to first/last package

Actions

• / - Start searching for packages
• u - Update the selected package
• x - Uninstall the selected package
• q - Quit the application

Search Mode

• Type any character to search for packages by name
• Enter or Esc - Exit search and return to browsing
• Navigation keys (↑/↓/←/→ or k/j/h/l) still work while searching