I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system since 2020. The main drivers to switch were ability to run containers natively and curiosity ;)

As years go by I find myself using terminal more and more. Many things for which I used to open some GUI app now can be done in terminal.

So… I figured why wouldn’t I develop a modern Kubernetes TUI (Terminal User Interface)? Especially now then I’ve got some spare AI coding tokens.

A very first question was a name. I figured Kubernetes + Terminal = KuTe or kute.

Next questions was which framework to use. Wind back a couple of years ago I played with crush - Glamourous agentic coding for all. I was impressed with its UI - it was just gorgeous. At that time I learned that crush was build with bubbletea - A powerful little TUI framework. This is how I knew instantly which framework I’m going to use for kute.

Kute

So please welcome Kute a Bubble Tea/Lip Gloss terminal UI for Kubernetes.

The idea is quite simple: Kubernetes already exposes nearly everything an operator needs, but the answer is usually scattered across resources, events, conditions, logs, and describe output.

kute brings those signals together in a keyboard-driven incident console where every view is designed to answer an operational question: Where is it broken? Why is it broken? What changed? It is deliberately not another dashboard or abstraction layer—it keeps the cluster’s actual state visible, puts unhealthy workloads and useful failure details first, and shows the exact kubectl equivalent before performing an action.

The goal is to make Kubernetes troubleshooting faster and clearer without hiding how the cluster really works.

In addition, kute offers fast, intuitive navigation and seamless namespace switching, making it easy to move between resources and namespaces without interrupting your workflow.

Compatibility

kute uses the standard Kubernetes API and is expected to work with conformant Kubernetes distributions. The following combinations have been validated: