// the find
nklmilojevic/sofka
A Kubernetes TUI, reimagined in Rust - built on kube-rs and ratatui, async-first from the ground up.
sofka is a k9s-style Kubernetes terminal UI in Rust, built on kube-rs and ratatui, with async I/O so cluster calls don't freeze the screen. It suits people who already work in k9s and want a single binary that handles Flux and Argo CD actions and Helm inspection without the flux, argocd, or helm binaries installed.
- Flux and Argo CD actions (suspend, resume, reconcile, sync) are native API patches, and the Helm inspector decodes release Secrets directly. That matters on a bastion or minimal jump host where you don't want to install three CLIs.
- The headless modes are useful. `--check` connects, runs discovery, and exits, and `--snapshot` renders one frame to stdout, so the rendering path can be exercised in CI without a TTY.
- `--readonly` and per-context `readonly = true` are wired to the mode switch on every `:ctx` change, so a prod context stays read-only even when you hop between clusters in one session.
- Distribution is thorough: prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows on aarch64 and x86_64, DEB, RPM, APK, and Arch packages, a Nix flake, a Home Manager module, and `cargo install`. The release packaging has its own Python test suite under scripts/.
- Release binaries are unsigned and unnotarized on macOS, and the README tells users to strip the quarantine attribute. That's fine for a personal tool but a real obstacle if you want to roll it out to a team's laptops.
- Native describe is experimental and off by default, so `d` still shells out to kubectl unless you opt in. The 'no external binary' story holds for Flux, Argo, and Helm but not for describe.
- The k9s benchmark and the feature comparison are the author's own, in docs/benchmark-k9s.md and docs/vs-k9s.md. The numbers look specific, but I haven't seen them reproduced independently, so treat them as a claim to verify on your own clusters.
- The feature surface is wide for a project this young: plugins, workspaces, bookmarks, VictoriaLogs history, a fleet dashboard, guardrails, and an action journal. The `--allow-v1-client-cert` flag and a `legacy_tls` module suggest real-world TLS edge cases have already come up, so test against your own CA and auth setup before depending on it.