k9s

k9s is a terminal UI for managing Kubernetes clusters by Fernand Galiana, written in Go and licensed Apache-2.0. Instead of typing repetitive kubectl commands, you get a live, keyboard-driven dashboard: browse pods, services, deployments, and namespaces with aliases like :po and :svc, filter resources in real time, tail logs, exec into pod shells, describe resources, edit manifests, and restart workloads with single keystrokes. It watches the cluster continuously, so state changes appear without refreshing.

Power features include context and namespace switching, a plugin system and aliases for custom commands, skins and themes, port-forwarding, and RBAC awareness so it respects the permissions of your kubeconfig. It is widely described in the DevOps community as the de facto standard Kubernetes TUI. No independent performance benchmarks were found; the speed claims are provider-stated and consistent with a Go binary driving the watch API. Installation is a package-manager one-liner, and it reads your existing ~/.kube/config.

Install via Homebrew (brew install derailed/k9s/k9s), Chocolatey, snap, the k9s apt/dnf repos, or a release binary. Run k9s to start with your current context, k9s --context name for a specific cluster, k9s -n namespace for a namespace. It reads ~/.kube/config automatically. Press : for command mode, / to filter, ? for the keybinding help.