Comparisons with Similar Packages/Tools

This page compares Kele with some of its peer packages.

Note

Given Kele’s relative infancy, this page compares less on concrete features and capabilities and more on design philosophy and overall goals. All packages listed here are, as of today, far more feature-complete than Kele.

kubernetes-el

kubernetes-el is a Kubernetes cluster management package for Emacs. It draws heavy inspiration from Magit, from its “status page”-centric interface design down to its prevalent use of Transient-based keybindings.

Kele itself draws inspiration from kubernetes-el. In fact, the author of Kele is a co-maintainer of kubernetes-el.

Kele draws from some lessons learned during kubernetes-el development and strives for a cluster management experience that has PLANS. Kele aims for a Kubernetes cluster management experience that is less intrusive, requires less context-switching, and is overall more performant than kubernetes-el. If Kele proves to be flexible enough that kubernetes-el could be re-implemented on top of Kele, then that’s a sign that we’ve done a good job here.

More critically, however, one of kubernetes-el‘s biggest limitations is its lack of support for custom resources. Not only does this limitation impose a very low ceiling on the package’s utility, the design decisions underpinning that limitation extend to kubernetes-el‘s incomplete support for the Kubernetes core API (see kubernetes-el/kubernetes-el#306. Overhauling the associated design decisions would amount, in my co-maintainer’s opinion, to a complete rewrite of kubernetes-el – hence my decision to kick off development on Kele.

kubel

kubel is a similar “UI-centric” cluster management package to kubernetes-el. Its advantage over kubernetes-el is its accommodation of users with limited privilege/permissions within the clusters in question.

Similar to kubernetes-el, Kele focuses on providing a cluster management experience that is more “piecemeal” (“get this targeted piece of information as quickly as possible and move on with your life”) and requires less context-switching – unavoidable with a status-page-centric user interface – than kubel.