WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by pogue on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:10AM (#49298946)

Is there something like this for Windows/Linux?

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by nedrichards on Friday August 14, 2026 @11:00AM (#49299612)

ChromeOS firmware has a bunch of this built in - it's super cool. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/chromebooks-iden... and https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1pyojjd/comme... and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA... is where I found out about it. A lot of the clever capabilities rely on the firmware that you have. Source - having spent a while a few weeks back getting Codex to poke at this topic on my machine https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux/blob/main/doc... since framework do reuse parts of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller in their firmware.

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by haunter on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:17AM (#49299043)

"This is a Linux-native reimplementation inspired by darrylmorley/whatcable"

https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux

But (hazard guess) it comes with a headless CLI binary (no GUI libraries needed) so probably could be ported to Linux (easily with an LLM?)

https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by VorpalWay on Friday August 14, 2026 @12:25PM (#49300956)

There is also https://github.com/Zetaphor/whatcable-linux (if you want a KDE UI rather than Gnome) and https://github.com/vzaliva/whatcable-linux-cli (a fork of the KDE repo, but only leaves the CLI tool).

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by notpushkin on Friday August 14, 2026 @12:37PM (#49301141)

WhatKable was right there!

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by delecti on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:15AM (#49299019)

There are options on Linux that you can google up (I don't know enough about any of them to endorse them by linking to one in particular).

As I understand it, Windows doesn't expose the necessary low-level hardware information for something like this to be possible.

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by duttish on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:19AM (#49299068)

A quick search found https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux, haven't tried it myself though

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by anticorporate on Friday August 14, 2026 @10:16AM (#49299029)

I came here to ask the same thing. I did find a Linux tool with the same name and purpose but that seems to be an entirely different codebase: https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux

I have a handful of wireless keyboards that just absolutely refuse to negotiate for charging with certain cables at all, so I'm hoping this will help me at least figure out what those keyboards are looking for in terms of cable.

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Re:WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do by SweetSoftPillow on Friday August 14, 2026 @02:04PM (#49302420)

Check this for more details on Windows (original author's repo) https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable-windows

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