One of my favorite features is pure speed, while still having a lot of functionality.

If a production bug happens and I need to quickly debug, not much is faster than:

- "k9s" (start the CLI)

- "/myservice" (search for the pod)

- "l" (open the logs)

- "/Exception" (search the logs)

Maybe the bug was a bad config file I need to manually edit:

- "<escape>" (close the log view)

- "s" (exec into the container)

K9s has almost completely replaced "kubectl" for me as well. And the dev team behind k9s is great too. We get a new patch about every week and a new feature every 2 weeks or so on average: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases

This might be faster:

    kubectl logs deployment/<whatever> | less

    kubectl exec -it deployment/whatever sh

The benefit of using tools like k9s and rancher is making it easy to explore your cluster. If you have hundreds of pods and services, using a gui tools to explore and manage your cluster is much easier than using kubectl.

I've found just the opposite, in clusters with usually about a hundred or so deployments per namespace and concomitant scale in pods, services, etc. GUI tools proved occasionally useful early on as I familiarized myself with k8s concepts and the system architecture at hand. Once I developed that basic level of familiarity, the 30,000' view largely ceased to be useful.

Yup, it's useful for exploration, but once you have a good mental model of the cluster's contents, the gui probably won't be as useful anymore, though personally I like to open the gui dashboard to watch live logs and graphana graph (it somehow calming to me).

I feel like this is one of those things like the Git CLI, where, yeah it's gross, but you're better off learning it without a porcelain at first because it's sufficiently complex that doing it the other way around will leave you initially bewildered when you need to venture beyond what the porcelain can help you with.

I love this tool. I have one terminal window always open with it.

I just downloaded it and I'm trying it out. It's sooo convenient. I know most of the commands from memory, but it's really nice to be able to run them with only a few, simple keystrokes, e.g. getting logs for a given pod or doing port forwarding, etc.

k9s is nice, but another option is Lens: https://k8slens.dev/

One of the tools that I use daily (only use kubectl to apply and delete resources), and one of my favorite UX in all software: Terminal-based GUI with keystrokes for everything.

It's like Norton/Midnight commander for Kubernetes.

And i love the K9 references!

An alternative to this is Octant, a full-blown GUI (not terminal) which looks pretty good and it's backef by VMWare https://octant.dev/

I'd tried Octant but found it rather slow for general use and went back to kubectl. With k9s however I use it extensively as it's so much quicker to get stuff done.

I do have it aliased to k9s --readonly by default to protect me from myself.

I really like octant and it’s been great seeing it get nicer each release.

I’ve found is super helpful figuring out why things aren’t working in pod, the visibility to effort ratio feels better to me than kubectl.

Disclaimer I work at vmware (but on a different team)

There's also https://infra.app which is really nice for a quick peek into the cluster.

I've been using this a lot the past year. It's consistently been improving along with each version. My main love for this tool is you can see the cluster health on the screen, can see evicted pods and running / scheduled cronjobs and easily jump into the shell of any running pod. This tool is always on one of my screens, definitely a job well done.

I was creating similar TUI tool with Mouse support as well.

LazyKubectl: https://github.com/vs4vijay/lazykubectl (WIP)

This is my favorite tool for jumping between kubernetes contexts/clusters and namespaces. I've used it daily for over a year and it's awesome

i'm going to take this for a spin. I dont really spend a ton of time looking at k8s, but I feel this is far superior to octant. I'm more of a cli junky though.

That name though is not in style. I understand that they are trying to pun on k8s and k9, but the 8 in k8s is there for a reason. k9s is confusingly pretending to hide 9 characters in the middle when it is not.

I think their mascot is a dog, as in "canine"

And... if it did?