// the find
sauljabin/kaskade
kaskade is a text user interface for kafka, which allows you to interact and consume topics from your terminal in style!
Kaskade is a terminal UI for Apache Kafka built on Textual, covering both admin operations (topic management, consumer group lag) and message consumption with multiple deserializers. It's aimed at developers who work with Kafka regularly and find the web UIs too heavy or unavailable in their environment.
Deserializer coverage is genuinely good — bytes, string, all numeric primitives, JSON, Avro (with and without Schema Registry), and Protobuf via descriptor files covers most real-world topic types without needing a separate tool. Confluent Cloud and Apicurio Registry both work out of the box via the `-c` flag passthrough to librdkafka, so you're not locked to vanilla Kafka. Installation via Homebrew or pipx means no fighting with Python virtualenvs. The included docker-compose files for Confluent, Redpanda, and Apicurio make local testing against realistic setups straightforward.
No runtime auto-refresh is a significant gap for anything resembling live monitoring — you have to restart to see new messages or updated lag numbers. Schema Registry support for Protobuf is missing, which will surprise teams that have standardized on that combination. The project has only 18 forks despite 1k stars, suggesting shallow community involvement and that bug fixes and feature additions are essentially a single-maintainer bet. Last push was March 2026 but the pace of releases has been slow, so protobuf-registry support and auto-refresh may not be coming soon.