trx-cli 0.1.11

A fast, keyboard-driven TUI package manager written in Rust.

Search 50,000+ packages in under 50ms. Install, remove, and update without leaving your terminal.

What is TRX?

TRX is a terminal UI built on top of your existing package manager. It gives you a unified, keyboard-first interface for searching, inspecting, and managing packages, whether you're on macOS with Homebrew, Arch with Pacman + AUR, or Debian/Ubuntu with APT.

No daemon. No config file. Just run trx.

Features

• Renderer built on ratatui with deterministic layout and minimal redraw overhead
• Fully non-blocking event loop using tokio
• Unified command model for package managers with pluggable backend architecture
• In-built fuzzy matcher optimized for substring scoring and ranking
• Self-updating mechanism – Checks for new releases on startup and updates automatically
• Stateless backend operations executed via system calls with structured output parsing
• Extensible design suitable for adding new package managers without modifying the core engine

Installation

One-liner (Recommended)

curl -fsSL https://trx.pidev.tech/install.sh | sh

From source

...

git clone https://github.com/pie-314/trx.git
cd trx
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/trx /usr/local/bin/

Requirements: Rust 1.70+ · Unicode/truecolor terminal

Cargo

cargo install trx

Usage

trx

Keybindings

Architecture

src/
├── main.rs              # Entry point, terminal setup
├── ui/
│   ├── app.rs           # App state, event loop, channel polling
│   └── input.rs         # Input mode, debounce logic
├── managers/
│   ├── mod.rs           # PackageManager trait, shared parsing
│   ├── arch.rs          # Pacman + AUR (yay) backend
│   ├── apt.rs           # APT backend
│   └── brew.rs          # Homebrew backend
└── fuzzy/
    └── mod.rs           # Scoring engine

PackageManager trait

pub trait PackageManager {
    fn search(&self, query: &str) -> Result<Vec<Package>, ManagerError>;
    fn install(&self, terminal: &mut DefaultTerminal, pkgs: &[String]) -> Result<(), ManagerError>;
    fn remove(&self, terminal: &mut DefaultTerminal, pkgs: &[String]) -> Result<(), ManagerError>;
    fn get_installed(&self) -> Result<Vec<Package>, ManagerError>;
    fn get_updates(&self) -> Result<Vec<Package>, ManagerError>;
    fn get_details(&self, name: &str, provider: &str) -> Result<DetailsState, ManagerError>;
    fn system_upgrade(&self, terminal: &mut DefaultTerminal) -> Result<(), ManagerError>;
    fn refresh_databases(&self) -> Result<(), ManagerError>;
}

Concurrency model

Search, list loads, and detail fetches all run on OS threads communicating via std::sync::mpsc. The main loop polls keyboard input with a short timeout, redraws each frame, and non-blockingly drains result channels.

Supported Package Managers

Roadmap

• Configurable keybindings via config file
• Pluggable themes and renderer settings
• Transaction history and rollback
• Batch mode for scripting / CI use
• Dependency graph visualizer
• Metadata caching for faster repeated searches
• Plugin system for custom backends and widgets
• Binary releases via GitHub Actions

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. If you're interested in Rust, terminal UIs, or package manager internals, pick an open issue or start a discussion.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT. See LICENSE for details.