Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go

Posted by rvermeulen98 1/23/2026

Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go(github.com)

278 points | 89 commentspage 2

GeoffKnauth 1/23/2026|

Using brew, I got "Apple could not verify `whosthere' is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." [Move to Trash] [Done]

cedws 1/23/2026||

It just means that the binary is not notarised. You can go into Privacy & Security to override.

sneak 1/23/2026|||

Unsigned binaries on macOS have slowly but surely been marginalized more and more with scarier and scarier warnings and harder hoops to jump through. You can enable execution in the system settings “Privacy and Security” pane.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with Apple’s subscription-based (and government ID requiring) developer program membership which is the only way to get such signatures.

petcat 1/23/2026||

I love the resurgence of TUI apps, but I wonder what the definition of "modern TUI" means in these cases. Does it basically mean just not using curses?

Daviey 1/23/2026|

It means it has a dependency on X11.

  $ go install github.com/ramonvermeulen/whosthere@latest
  # golang.design/x/clipboard
  clipboard_linux.c:14:10: fatal error: X11/Xlib.h: No such file or directory
    14 | #include <X11/Xlib.h>
       |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~
  compilation terminated.

fellerts 1/23/2026|||

That has nothing to do with the UI framework. The X11 dependency comes as part of the clipboard integration (which I'd argue should be optional or even removed). Still, I wouldn't call it modern if Wayland is outright not supported.

rvermeulen98 1/23/2026|||

I think this is only a problem when building from source, right? It is indeed because of the dependency on https://github.com/golang-design/clipboard.

I hesitated a bit bringing in this feature. On one hand, I really like to have clipboard support, on the other hand, I don't like that it requires you to change from static to dynamic linking (and have the x11 dependency).

Maybe I could write an install.sh script for installation that detects the OS and fetches the correct version/tarball from the Github release.

Daviey 1/23/2026||

That library isn't going to support Wayland any time soon, and requiring CGO isn't ideal IMO. See this bug, https://github.com/golang-design/clipboard/issues/6

How about this PR? https://github.com/ramonvermeulen/whosthere/pull/29

It switches to using github.com/dece2183/go-clipboard, which supports Mac, Windows, Linux (X11 + Wayland) and Android.

rvermeulen98 1/23/2026||

Thanks a lot for your contribution, this is something I will look into in the upcoming days. I totally agree that CGO isn't ideal, I had to make the build/release process also a lot more complicated purely for that clipboard requirement (see GHAs and the different goreleaser files).

On the other hand, I also don't want whosthere to be depended on a fork that isn't maintained anymore. I will think about this trade-off, but I am also interested how others look at this problem.

ok123456 1/23/2026|||

What's modern about Wayland?

petcat 1/23/2026||||

Yikes, so it's a "TUI" app... that still requires a display server? So I can't run this TUI over SSH or a virtual terminal. Wondering what the point of a tui is that still requires a gui environment to run?

Daviey 1/23/2026||

Sorry, I was unhelpfully flippant. You totally can, and I don't want to distract from the great app that has been shared. This bug was just a compile time issue, which needed X libs to bake in clipboard support which is optional at runtime.

rvermeulen98 1/24/2026||||

Just released version v0.2.1 eliminating the need for CGO, thanks for your contribution!

sigmonsays 1/23/2026|||

this stopped me from go installing it too on nixos. I'm not gonna put the effort in to run it.

There should be a build tag to disable clipboard, that'd be the easiest way around this.

Daviey 1/23/2026||

Same, I also had the same issue on NixOS :)

kapitanjakc 1/23/2026||

Good stuff, this saves me the trouble of going through router GUI. And remembering if it was 192.168.1.1 or 0.1 or what were the admin/root passwords.

adi_kurian 1/23/2026||

Looks great. Discovery.app is also useful if you’re mostly dealing with Apple / Bonjour-heavy networks. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/discovery-dns-sd-browser/id138...

pjmlp 1/24/2026||

Love how all these "modern" TUIs are basically replicating Turbo Vision, Clipper and curses.

Evidlo 1/23/2026||

I'm also working on a Go TUI tool. Any reason you went with tcell instead of charmbracelet ecosystem?

rvermeulen98 1/23/2026|

I started off using tview/tcell, and only later found out about bubbletea and the charmbracelet ecosystem. Then I didn't really find a solid reason to switch over to bubbletea. So far I really enjoyed the experience building the app with tview, the only real limitation I ran into was switching the theme at runtime, for which I had to build a custom mechanism.

Havoc 1/23/2026||

Busy building something similar with a view towards customising it for my LAN.

Specifically it needs to pull additional detail out of proxmox servers and opnsense plus deduce where things are physically based on latency.

Thats a whole lot easier if it doesn’t need to work universally & you can hardcode some assumptions

eqvinox 1/24/2026||

You forgot the most useful (and thus important) discovery tool of all:

  ping ff02::1%eth0

girishso 1/23/2026||

Great tool, only thing I miss is it doesn't show SAMBA names.

jarek83 1/23/2026|

Looks nice. I'd love to have a way to select anything on the screen or at least have a button to copy more info, like manufacturer name of a found device.

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