Let me know if this sounds familiar:
You're trying to debug why your local development stack is suddenly crawling. You open a terminal tab and run htop to find a runaway Node process. Then you open another tab and launch lazydocker to see if your Postgres container is crashing. Finally, you open a third tab to use systemctl to restart a background service.
As developers, we spend our entire day context-switching between 3 or 4 different terminal utilities just to keep our local environments
running.
I got frustrated with this workflow. I wanted a single "God Mode" dashboard that brought processes, Docker containers, and system services under one roof. So, I built nman (Novitas Manager).
What is nman?
nman is a blazing-fast, cross-platform (macOS & Linux) Terminal User Interface (TUI) written entirely in Rust. It replaces the need to jump between multiple CLI tools by giving you a unified, interactive dashboard.
Here are the features I’m most proud of:
### 1. The Global Fuzzy Command Palette (Press :)
My favorite feature. From anywhere in the app, you can press the colon (:) to open a fuzzy-finder command palette. If you type "kill node" or "logs nginx," nman instantly figures out what domain (process, container, or service) you are talking about and executes the command. No more hunting through lists.
### 2. The Dynamic Process Tree (Press T)
Standard process lists can be overwhelming. By pressing T, nman instantly indents child processes under their parents. Now you can actually understand why a process is running (e.g., seeing all your Chrome helper threads neatly tucked under the main browser process).
### 3. Interactive Log Filtering (Press /)
When you are streaming live logs for a Docker container, it can be like drinking from a firehose. In nman, you can just press / and type
"error." The UI will instantly filter the live log stream to only show lines matching your query.
### 4. Full Mouse Support
TUIs are great, but sometimes you just want to click. nman has 100% mouse support right out of the box. You can click tabs, scroll through your process lists with your mouse wheel, and smoothly scroll through logs without touching your keyboard.
## 🛠️ The Tech Stack
If you're curious about how it was built under the hood, I used the following:
• Rust: For memory safety and minimal resource footprint (a system monitor shouldn't consume all your resources!).
• Ratatui: The absolute best Rust library for building rich terminal interfaces.
• sysinfo: For pulling cross-platform (Mac & Linux) CPU, memory, and process metrics.
• Bollard: An asynchronous Rust client for the Docker API.
## Try it out! 🚀
I wanted to make the installation friction as close to zero as possible. If you use Homebrew, you can install it in seconds:
brew install novitaswebworks/tap/proc-manager
Once installed, just type nman in your terminal!
(If you don't use Homebrew, there is a curl installer available on the GitHub repo).
Feedback Welcome!
I built this tool to solve my own itch, but I'd love to know what the community thinks. Check out the source code on GitHub and drop a star if you find it useful, and let me know in the comments what features you'd like to see next!
🔗 GitHub Repository: novitaswebworks/proc-manager https://github.com/novitaswebworks/proc-manager***
