K9s

K9s is a terminal UI for Kubernetes. It talks to the cluster using your current kubeconfig (same as kubectl).

Official installation guide: Install

Prerequisites

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• A working kubectl context (kubectl cluster-info should succeed)
• A terminal that supports 256 colors (on Unix, TERM=xterm-256color is typical)
• For in-app edits, set EDITOR or KUBE_EDITOR to your preferred editor

export TERM=xterm-256color
export KUBE_EDITOR="${KUBE_EDITOR:-vim}"

Installation

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For macOS, Windows, and other install options (MacPorts, Chocolatey, Scoop, tarball layout details, building from source), follow the official installation guide.

Linux

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Arch Linux:

pacman -S k9s

Homebrew on Linux:

brew install derailed/k9s/k9s

Other distributions: download a release tarball for your architecture from GitHub releases, extract it, and place the k9s binary on your PATH.

Run

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k9s

K9s uses the current context from kubeconfig. There is no separate “command line” in the traditional sense: you work through colon commands (:), shortcuts, and key bindings.

1. Resource navigation (:)

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Type : to enter command mode, then a resource alias.

Core workloads

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Cluster and infrastructure

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Storage

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Config and secrets

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Ingress and networking

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2. Search and filtering

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Example: type /nginx to narrow the list to resources whose visible text matches nginx.

3. Navigation

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4. Actions on a resource

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Bindings can vary slightly by view; the help screen (?) is authoritative for the active context.

5. Context and namespace

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6. Metrics and sorting

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• Open a resource with : as usual.
• Shift+S toggles or cycles sort modes depending on the view.
• When metrics are available, you can often sort by CPU or memory from the table headers / sort UI for that view.

7. Global shortcuts

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8. Example debugging flow

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1. :ns — pick a namespace
2. :po — list pods
3. /crash — filter to suspicious names or statuses
4. Enter — open the pod
5. l — logs
6. d — describe
7. s — exec shell
8. y — inspect YAML