// the find
EdJoPaTo/mqttui
Subscribe to a MQTT Topic or publish something quickly from the terminal
mqttui is a terminal-based MQTT client written in Rust that covers the three things you actually need day-to-day: an interactive TUI for watching a live topic tree, quick publish from the command line or stdin, and scriptable single-message reads. It's aimed at IoT/home-automation developers who are tired of spinning up MQTT Explorer or fighting mosquitto_sub flags every time they need to debug a broker.
The `read-one` subcommand with `--ignore-retained` is genuinely useful for scripting — piping MQTT payloads into shell variables is something mosquitto_sub handles poorly. The log output format (retained flag, QoS, payload length, timestamp) is dense but exactly what you need when chasing a misbehaving device. Wide packaging support (Alpine, Arch, Homebrew, .deb, .rpm, Windows) means it actually lands on the machines where you need it. The clean-retained subcommand filling a gap that most MQTT tools ignore entirely is a nice touch.
TLS/auth story is buried — 'encryption.rs' exists but the README says nothing about client certificates or mutual TLS, which matters the moment you connect to anything beyond a local test broker. No MQTT 5 support mentioned anywhere; for anyone using user properties, shared subscriptions, or reason codes, this tool is a dead end. The interactive graph is present but with no axis labels or scale controls visible in the directory structure, it's likely cosmetic-only for anything but simple scalar values. 683 stars and 35 forks after what appears to be years of development suggests it's found a small loyal audience but hasn't broken through — the feature set may not go deep enough to displace MQTT Explorer for serious debugging sessions.