A finger client built for exploring, not just querying.
Finger is one of the oldest things on the internet (RFC 1288, TCP port 79): ask a server about a person and it tells you who they are, whether they're logged in, and whatever they've left in their .plan file.
It faded once the web arrived, but never died. On the small internet, tilde communities and pubnixes still run finger servers, and people keep a .plan as a slow, personal microblog. lookit is for poking around that world.
While the finger command is built around querying a specific address, lookit is built for exploring when you don't know where you're going.
It doesn't show you anything finger couldn't — finger @host has always listed who's around. What it adds is movement: the user list is selectable, links inside a response are drillable, and you can walk back through where you've been without re-fetching. It turns a string of one-off commands into one session.
It's built on the Charm stack, so it behaves like the TUIs you already use and adapts to light or dark terminals.
The prebuilt binaries are the simplest option and need no Go installed. Grab the archive for your OS and architecture from the Releases page, unpack it, and move the lookit binary onto your PATH. This is the recommended approach on a tilde or pubnix box, where the system Go is often too old to build from source.
With Go 1.21 or newer you can install from source instead:
go install github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit@latestOr clone the repo and run go build ..
lookit # open the browser
lookit jonathan@tilde.team # open it on one person
lookit @plan.cat # open it on a host, then browse its users
lookit @tilde.team:79 # spell out the port (79 is the default)
lookit --versionType a target and press Enter to fetch it. Finger a bare @host and, when it answers with a list of users, lookit opens that list: move with the arrows, / to filter, Enter to finger whoever's highlighted. Enter on a user drills in, Esc walks back through where you've been, and Ctrl+C quits.
Everything is keyboard-driven. Press ? inside lookit for the full, context-aware key list.
- A finger server. It won't host your
.planor answer anyone's queries; that job belongs tofingerd. lookit only reads. - A way to write: it doesn't post or edit.
- A background process. Nothing polls and nothing runs as a daemon.
- A general small-web browser. It speaks finger and follows
finger://links, but won't fetch gopher, gemini, or the web.
- Richer styling and link discovery, tuned to how today's finger servers format their menus and links.
- Discovery and subscriptions: finding finger hosts worth a visit, and following a
.planto see what's changed since you last looked. - Maybe a local mode: finger the machine you're already on, reading its users and
.planfiles straight off disk with no network round-trip.
lookit is built with Charm tools: Bubble Tea, Bubbles, and Lip Gloss; the demo gif above was recorded with another Charm tool, VHS. It speaks RFC 1288 finger over TCP/79.
Bug reports, ideas, and PRs are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT © 2026 Jonathan Deamer.