WTF — Personal Terminal Dashboard for Developers

Introduction

WTF is a terminal dashboard application written in Go that displays information from multiple services in a single glanceable view. It is designed for developers and ops engineers who want to monitor calendars, to-do lists, Git repos, CI pipelines, and cloud resources without leaving the terminal.

What WTF Does

• Renders a configurable grid of widgets inside a terminal window
• Pulls data from services like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and Google Calendar
• Displays system stats, weather, network info, and custom command output
• Refreshes each widget on an independent schedule
• Supports keyboard navigation and interactive actions within widgets

Architecture Overview

WTF is a single Go binary built on the tview TUI library. The dashboard layout is defined in a YAML configuration file that specifies widget positions on a grid, data sources, and refresh intervals. Each widget runs its own update goroutine and renders independently. Credentials for external services are read from the config file or environment variables.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Install via Homebrew, Snap, or download a prebuilt binary from GitHub Releases
• Create ~/.config/wtf/config.yml to define your layout and widgets
• Position widgets using grid row, column, height, and width values
• Store API tokens in environment variables and reference them with ${ENV_VAR} syntax
• Run wtfutil to launch; press / to filter or Tab to cycle focus between widgets

Key Features

• Over 50 built-in widget modules covering DevOps, productivity, and system monitoring
• Fully keyboard-driven navigation with per-widget key bindings
• Lightweight single binary with no runtime dependencies
• Open-source and extensible — add custom widgets in Go
• Works over SSH sessions, ideal for remote server dashboards

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Sampler — focused on shell command visualization; WTF integrates with third-party APIs natively
• tmux + scripts — flexible but requires manual gluing; WTF provides a cohesive dashboard experience
• Grafana — full observability platform with browser UI; WTF is a lightweight terminal-only alternative
• Glances — system monitoring only; WTF covers external services like GitHub and Jira

FAQ

Q: Does WTF require a database or server? A: No. It is a standalone binary that reads a YAML config and talks directly to external APIs.

Q: Can I add my own custom widget? A: Yes. WTF supports a CmdRunner widget for arbitrary shell commands, and you can write new modules in Go.

Q: How do I secure API keys in the config? A: Reference environment variables with ${VAR_NAME} instead of hardcoding secrets in the YAML file.

Q: Does it work on Windows? A: Yes. Prebuilt Windows binaries are available on the Releases page.

Sources

• https://github.com/wtfutil/wtf
• https://wtfutil.com