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

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by Daviey on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:29AM (#46732893)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by sigmonsays on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:47AM (#46734665)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by Daviey on Friday January 23, 2026 @02:25PM (#46736649)

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by petcat on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:19AM (#46733526)

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?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by Daviey on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:24AM (#46733589)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by fellerts on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:37AM (#46733001)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by rvermeulen98 on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:53AM (#46733189)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by Daviey on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:03AM (#46733303)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by rvermeulen98 on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:53AM (#46733953)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by ok123456 on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:41AM (#46733810)

What's modern about Wayland?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TU... by rvermeulen98 on Saturday January 24, 2026 @05:38AM (#46742455)

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

[ Parent | on HN ]