pkgx
the developer tool to run anything, anywhere
Introducing pkgx - a blazingly fast, standalone, cross‐platform binary that runs anything, anywhere. What’s better than a package manager? No package manager!
Reviews for pkgx
Hear what real users highlight about this tool.
Early adopters praise pkgx for smoothing cross‑platform workflows, automating dependencies, and “just working” across machines—some even replacing multiple runtime managers. Several highlight the GUI’s simplicity, fast updates, and sandboxing that avoids environment conflicts. Users report productivity gains in dev setups, builds, and onboarding new laptops. However, the rebrand from tea to pkgx drew sharp criticism: sudden breakage, inadequate communication, and confusion around expected “brew-like” commands and migration paths. Overall sentiment is strongly positive on speed and convenience, tempered by trust concerns from the transition.
This AI-generated snapshot distills top reviewer sentiments.
I've had some time to use it, and it's just wow! it's very cool! my life is a little easier now
Great product! Using myself, really automate and support my dev process.
It would be nice to be able to set up a fixed (voluntary) monthly contribution amount to distribute among the used packages authors automatically. (I saw that you plan to add some monetization, I’m just suggesting the model that makes sense to me.) Something along the lines of SetApp.
PS There’s a typo on the “open in terminal” image. “S” is missing in the word “constrained.”
This rebrand was handled absolutely horribly. Breaking every installation of tea for a rebrand pretty much makes this project persona non-grata in anyone's playbook. If there was communication, it was ridiculously brief. The decision to break EVERY INSTALLED tea installation just to rebrand pretty much makes it obvious there's no interest in stability. Why would I possibly adopt pkgx after this? I'll just adopt NIX, which I was avoiding.
Don’t know what to think. I’ve been using Tea for months with about 8 packages installed. Today I decided to update Tea itself (via update menu option within the GUI) and bam…the app disappeared from my apps folder with no trace of what happened. Now I see Tea has been replaced with pkgx (on Product Hunt and Github, not my computer), however some type of warning or info would have been helpful.
disclaimer #1: I work at tea to that end, we think the kind of people that enjoy discovering projects on github intersect with people who, first and foremost, want to use them. so, how can we build on homebrew with its simplicity to remove the only barrier between a package that you find and your using it?
a core principle we focused on was to develop a package manager that eliminated the package management for end users. tea focuses on usage, allowing you to use anything you discover on GitHub, as long as it is packaged by us. We built on Homebrew's simplicity, by replacing brew install foo with a much simpler tea foo -- effectively bypassing the install step, so you can use it without any additional steps.
disclaimer #2: i am a python developer, so package management to me by definition is along the lines of virtual environments, making sure i get numpy before pandas, etc. etc.
one standout feature of tea is that it sandboxes everything. tea automatically injects virtual environments with the required packages into project directories with a readme and .git. i found this feature particularly valuable, especially when dealing with graphviz and pygraphviz. tea consistently solves such issues, ensuring a smooth development process.
disclaimer #3: I am learning bash right now, but prefer a front-end app.
the gui is what you hope GitHub's discover page was. we've got some fun AI tools right now, including stable diffusion's web-ui and openai's whisper trained on llama -- all open source.
tea is amazing!
For a few months now, I have been using and integrating the tea CLI for an application development framework that I am authoring, called Stacks.js. I ended up choosing tea because it ended up being the most seamless (and cross-platform capable) dependency manager. Node, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and much more are included natively.
(Amongst other things, it was a great excuse to remove the fnm and nvm dependencies.)
Good luck with all of it! 🎉
I've been using tea for months, and it's great.
Especially the 'magics' part: when I set up a new laptop with my existing bashrc and aliases, they "just work" without manually installing everything, thanks to tea
I guess I'm an early tea adopter and I prefer it to anything else. There's something so refreshing to having the same software stack on my macOS and Linux computers. It's so much easier than Docker for many tasks. This is the first community project that I've felt really good contributing to. Max and the tea team have been very responsive and it has been such a pleasure working with them.
Although I often have to work with the terminal in my work, I honestly hate it. Tea Gui is just wow for me. Beautiful and user-friendly interface, installing/updating packages with just a click of a button. This is mega cool!