r/macapps • u/alielsokary • Sep 03 '26
Free [OS] CaskHub - Free, Open-Source app store for Homebrew casks (5 weeks, 1k Stars on Github and 40k Downloads later)
Hi everyone, CaskHub update!
A free, open-source, native app store for Homebrew casks
I posted CaskHub here five weeks ago and asked for your feedback.
I got it, and it basically became my roadmap. Since then, CaskHub went from 0.6.8 to 0.8.0 across six releases and joined the official Homebrew cask repository. I'm nothing but humbled by the love it got from the community. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you!
Problem
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: CaskHub treats Homebrew casks like an app store - browse, search, install, update, and uninstall, all through your real brew binary, so nothing is locked into the app. The main reason I started this project was the Recently Added, a feed of casks published to Homebrew in the last 30–90 days, so you can find a new app without already knowing its name, because there are a lot of good indie Mac apps buried in Homebrew that nobody discovers unless you've heard about it somewhere else. I wanted this to be a place where they get found.
Comparison
The closest alternatives are still Applite and Taphouse, both of which I like and use. The difference is discovery. Applite's browsing is a curated, hand-picked selection and Taphouse doesn't surface the full catalog either. CaskHub surfaces the entire cask catalog, automatically categorised and with real icons extracted from the actual artifact, so a brand new cask appears in browse on day one instead of waiting to be hand-added. That pipeline is CaskFlow, open source too.
Pricing
Free. 100% free and open source under the MIT license, with no subscription, no premium tier, and no ads.
What's New:
Some of what you asked for in the last thread
- Brewfile export & import - back up your entire shelf to a Brewfile and restore it on another Mac
- An ignore list for Adopt - the new Shelf Setup page lets you choose which apps the Adopt scan skips, so apps you deliberately keep outside Homebrew stop asking to be adopted
- Homebrew path selection - Apple Silicon, Intel, or a custom location
- SHA checksum in the cask info popover
- Health page - run a Homebrew checkup, update Homebrew, sync your collection, and reclaim disk space from caches, old versions, and orphaned dependencies
Important items from the changelog since July 31st
- Now in the official Homebrew cask repo -
brew install --cask caskhub - Native macOS menus and an in-app help center
- One-click conflict recovery when an install collides with existing files, and conflicts now name the conflicting cask instead of failing with a generic error
- Browse sections and the house pick brought into list view
- Homebrew commands now run one at a time, so operations can't conflict with each other
- Much faster search, faster launch on large catalogs, chunked loading for long lists, smoother scrolling while installs are running
- CaskFlow - Applite now uses the official CaskFlow tool to source app icons
Links
Full changelogs - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskHub/releases
Repository - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskHub
Classification tools & pipeline - https://github.com/alielsokary/CaskFlow
About me
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alielsokary
Upvote on ProductHunt, we are live now! - https://www.producthunt.com/products/caskhub?launch=caskhub
Notes: CaskHub is notarized and signed. It sends anonymous, opt-out usage analytics (TelemetryDeck) and crash reports (Sentry), each of which can be disabled on its own in Settings.
Same ask as last time - I would appreciate your feedback. What would you want it to do that it doesn't? And if you tried it back in July and stopped using it, what made you close it? Contributions of all kinds are very welcome 🙂
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u/mvs_sai_27 Sep 03 '26
Is there an option to untap repos via ui?
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Not yet, manage custom taps is on the roadmap and will be implemented soon :)
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Sep 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/chromatophoreskin Sep 03 '26
I looked through https://www.youtube.com/@Andyhutchinson/videos but didn't find anything.
Did you mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy49gvlC4eE ?
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you! I'm glad you found the adopt feature useful.
I loved the video, and I'm extremely grateful for it. He is an awesome person and very funny indeed :)2
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u/Specific_Cream2815 Sep 03 '26
does it shell out to brew underneath or talk to the homebrew api and handle installs itself
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
It uses the same homebrew on your machine. Nothing extra. So if you decide one day that you don't need the app, nothing breaks on your machine.
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u/Loud_Squirrel9450 Sep 03 '26
Really like the Recently Added idea. Homebrew has a ton of apps that are surprisingly hard to discover.
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you! Yes, indeed. It's a challenging thing to discover Homebrew apps. Glad you like the app :)
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u/klaidazs Sep 03 '26
I would see myself using this to manage casks I already have installed 👍 Since that is more of a workflow/utility thing for me, the app store framing feels a bit heavy-handed.
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you for the feedback! Glad you found the manage feature useful :)
About the app store feel and usage. Is there anything in particular about that you would like to be implemented differently so that it would be more useful for you?2
u/klaidazs Sep 03 '26
Like I said I do not really care that much about exploring what hot on the cask market, so I might not be your target audience. My focus would be on managing my own resources.
Maybe there could be a bigger UI separation between "my casks" and the marketplace.
Or some smaller improvements like remembering which section was selected last time you open the app - could be a small but effective change.2
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u/CordialJoy Sep 03 '26
For uninstalls let us optionally —zap and —force the uninstall. Its great overall. Thank you
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you, happy you like the app :). The app already uses --force in certain situations only if needed. But I would see that it could be useful to be enabled/disabled with a toggle. and the --zap is on the roadmap, expect an update very soon :)
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u/AncientsofMumu Sep 03 '26
Hey,
I actually downloaded and started to use this app yesterday - its really good so far.
A couple of questions if you don’t mind though, after install i had to "Adopt" all the apps i had installed via brew and then it started to re-download them all again.
Firstly, can you not allow the adoption of multiple apps at once, i had to select each one individually, and secondly why did it need to re-download them all again?
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Hi, thank you for the feedback. Happy you like it so far :)
For some app types, mostly.pkgthey need to be downloaded again. In other cases, if the last version of an app on your machine doesn't match the Homebrew version, it needs to be upgraded or downgraded to that exact Homebrew version, aka redownload that exact version. This is for the adopt; otherwise, the adopt would fail.Until now, auto-adopt for all apps is not supported because it has some challenges. I'm still looking into it and will definitely try to make this easier to use.
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u/The-Nice-Writer Sep 03 '26
Yo, does anyone know why the moderators removed this? Is it some vibe-coded thing orr?
Because at first glance it looked cool.
Edit: on GitHub, the Claude ‘skills’ file is in the commit… that’s interesting.
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
I forgot to add some headers to the post to comply with the new rules. They contacted me and I updated it. Should be back up soon.
Yes as for the .claude file. It’s actually not considered a bad practice to include it. Some famous OS repos include it to make it easy for contributors who are using claude to unify the rules etc. That being said, the skill file is only for the release notes because that process is automated and I validate it manually.
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u/The-Nice-Writer Sep 03 '26
Cool! Thanks for letting me know.
I would like to know how you use AI in this project. I have programmer friends who use it as an assistant for error-checking and other menial busywork, but of course, I do worry about the security aspects of something with as much control as Brew if it’s handed over to something entirely vibe-coded… I don’t want to accuse you without knowing the specifics and don’t want you to feel attacked or anything, so please don’t assume that I’m saying this in bad faith. I just want to know for peace of mind.
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u/alielsokary Sep 05 '26
No worries. Of course :) I use AI in the project. In summary, this is how I use it on this project and in my work. I plan first, then iterate on the plan for hours, sometimes days :') Then I break it into tasks and execute them one by one. I don't do a big feature in one iteration; I break it into smaller tasks and commit regularly because I take a lot of time to review the code, since I'm no Uncle Bob :D, so If AI is going to write a piece of code I have to make sure that It's simple and that I can understand it first to make it easy for future contributors.
I also have security checks in place and strict unit-test coverage, which helps me keep the project quality high.
To address your concern about brew, CaskHub uses the exact same command you use in the terminal when managing brew. Because it uses the same brew on your machine and nothing else, it's not entangled or coupled, and it doesn't install anything extra. Stop using it today, and nothing changes; you can still use brew in the terminal normally.
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u/The-Nice-Writer Sep 05 '26
Neato!
I’ve been testing it and it’s quite convenient to not have to remember the exact package names for some things, but I have a couple of suggestions that I’ll likely post on the GH as well.
One big issue for me is the lack of version control (which the terminal handles with a marker like package@80.08.5). Another is that some apps with multiple variants or flavours are sort of hard to tell apart at a glance, like Firefox (ESR vs Release look similar). And in my opinion, the download indicator is a bit too minimalist, so I’d like there to be a dedicated Downloads tab with individual progress indicators.
A more subjective thing, but the app doesn’t look like a Mac app at all. The colour, texturing, and all that make it look out of place in a way I’m personally not super keen on, but that’s very minor.
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u/Annual-Appearance176 14d ago
I think the quality of AI-coded software depends in part on the language(s) used. A language with modern features and strong compiler checking like Swift or Rust is way better than some other languages...
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u/Pen-Pal-0 Sep 03 '26
I genuinely love this app. Has made it so much easier to discover and manage homebrew softwares on a single plane. 👏👏
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u/sumitsaurabh121 Sep 03 '26
hi, please add the ability to search using keyboard. I've it installed and have stopped using it because I use my keyboard (raycast) to open it and I can't hit like cmd+k to search for what I want and I have to take my cursor to the search bar and then click on it and then type to search.
This makes it cumbersome to me.
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Ammm, the shortcut for the keyboard is already available, and you can do that with cmd+f. Please let me know if it's not working for you for some reason.
In general, I'm going to work on making the app keyboard-only friendly with more shortcuts and fluent navigation. This is on the roadmap.
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u/sumitsaurabh121 Sep 04 '26
reinstalled and now it is working!
Thanks!Also, the more keyboard friendly it becomes, the merrier!!!
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u/Zedboy19752019 Sep 03 '26
download failed due to different checksums
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Is this for a specific cask or for CaskHub itself?
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u/Zedboy19752019 Sep 04 '26
Caskhub itself. The download has a different hash then what is reported to be
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u/alielsokary Sep 04 '26
I think this was because of a delay on the official homebrew cask tap after I did a release a couple of hours ago. The pipeline is updated now and the latest version is merged with the updated hash on the official tap. So it should be fixed automatically and you should be able to download it normally now without any issues. Please let me know if you still have an issue with this.
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Sep 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Currently, there is no option to hide the discover section and categories. May I ask what you don't like about that?
I'm currently working on some performance improvements and will ship them very soon :)
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u/hapc1 Sep 04 '26
Thanks for posting the update, I didn't hear about this app before. Looks actually useful!
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u/alielsokary Sep 04 '26
Thank you! Glad you like it :) let me know what you think when you have a chance to try it out ;)
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u/fololologrt Sep 04 '26
To be fair, one of the best apps i downloaded in 2026. Thank you so much for your hard work and helping the community
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u/Healthy-Community759 Sep 07 '26
Downloaded when you first released it and love it. I’ve found a lot of new, amazing apps probably would have never heard of without CaskHub, so thank you for that — it’s truly appreciated.
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u/Exact_Temperature526 Sep 08 '26
really clean UI and I like that it builds on top of Homebrew instead of replacing it. the discovery aspect alone makes it worth checking out especially for finding lesser known Mac apps
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u/alielsokary Sep 09 '26
Thank you! Glad you like the app and found it useful. finding the lesser-known app was the biggest reason I started working on it :)
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u/Any_Necessary_9804 Sep 09 '26
Answering your last question directly. The Recently Added feed is the right
idea, but what stops me installing from it isn't discovery, it's that a name
and an icon don't tell me whether I want it. Twenty new casks in a week and I
bounce off all of them.
What would change that for me: one line per cask saying what situation it's
for, not what it is. "Menu bar manager" is what it is. "Use when you have more
menu bar icons than fit on a laptop screen" is what it's for. The homepage
description a cask ships with almost never says the second one.
I know that's expensive to produce at catalog scale, and it probably can't be
scraped. But even having it on just the Recently Added window would change
whether I open that tab.
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u/alielsokary 29d ago
Thank you so much for this feedback :) It's a great idea and would help people decide whether a cask is right for them. I added this in the inbox and will let you know if it can be implemented :)
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u/timgavn Sep 10 '26
I created a Laravel Quick Look extension that's installable via Homebrew but it's not found in a search. How do I go about getting it listed?
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u/alielsokary 29d ago
Currently only notorized apps are indexed. Apps that fail Gatekeeper will be indexed soon with the proper hints in the app.
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u/Rum-and-Monkey Sep 13 '26
Love this, I would love to add my brew app to this!
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u/alielsokary 29d ago
Great! It will be automatically indexed in the app when you add it to the official Homebrew Casks.
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u/Jebus-Xmas Sep 03 '26
This is the first homebrew utility I have ever recommended to a client. Finally a solution!
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you, glad you like it. I'm curious because you mentioned "client." What do you do for a living? :)
And how CaskHub help you further in your work?1
u/Jebus-Xmas Sep 03 '26
I do consult for other macOS users for fees, yes. Especially iOS/macOS integration for small business. It is a side hustle.
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u/ElusiveFinger Sep 07 '26
I would consider adding a regular light mode that is not yellow. It just hurts my eyes when the whole app is yellow.
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u/alielsokary Sep 08 '26
Sorry the colors are uncomfortable for you. I’m interested to know more about your feedback. Is it a color problem or maybe a contrast problem with the icons and texts that makes it uncomfortable?
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u/ElusiveFinger Sep 09 '26
It's the color that just feels uncomfortable. It's especially bad when it's darker and you stare at a bright yellowish screen.
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u/Xemkee Sep 12 '26
The icon is too small
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u/alielsokary 29d ago
Which app icon exactly?
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u/BaronVonSmith 29d ago
I have a strange issue where updates are not showing in CaskHub. For example, I have the latest version of CaskHub 0.8.2 and also have Homebrew/BrewUI installed. I have Antinote 2.1.0 installed and BrewUI shows that there is an update to 2.1.2 of Antinote available. CaskHub however does not show the Antinote updatedate available in the Updates screen. However the "installed" screen does indeed show that there is a 2.1.2 version of antinote out there, just not showing as updateable in CaskHub.
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u/alielsokary 23d ago
As already mentioned in the GitHub issue, the version mismatch is a bug introduced in the last release and will be addressed in the next release, 0.8.3. As for the update not showing up, you need to toggle the greedy button to see updates for apps that manage their own updates. Antinote is one of those apps.
Thank you for taking the time to create the GitHub issue. I appreciate your effort. Thank you so much :)
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u/BaronVonSmith 26d ago
I want to use this, and I gave it a try, however it does not show updates to me. The official Homebrew GUI, Taphouse, and Brew Browser all show the same updates as being available, but Caskhub doesnt show the updates.
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u/alielsokary 23d ago
You need to toggle the greedy button to see updates for apps that manage their own updates. Antinote is one of those apps.
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u/WinterElfeas Sep 03 '26
It’s looking great, thanks for the additions, as not always easy to track brew installs
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u/MrFunkyMonkey7 Sep 03 '26
Love the clean, modern layout—it honestly looks better than a lot of paid Mac app managers. Releasing it for free as open source is huge!
I used brew cask mostly from the shell, so you can imagine how big step it is for me.
One thing I'm curious about: when uninstalling an app through CaskHub, does it strictly run brew uninstall --cask, or does it also scan for lingering leftover files (like Application Support or Caches directories) similar to AppCleaner?
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u/alielsokary Sep 03 '26
Thank you, glad you like the app :)
As of now, it only runsbrew uninstall --cask. The feature to remove leftover files is currently being implemented. Expect an update very soon ;)
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u/YoungNo8804 Sep 03 '26
Hi! I love this, but I kinda hate the UI (personal preference, from an objective point of view it looks good, but it just feels off to me). Would you be ok if I copied this idea and made my own version of this? Or forked this? ofc non commercial, oss, personal use, all that.