quien: A Better WHOIS Lookup Tool

The whois command dumps a wall of unformatted text. I built quien, a Go CLI that replaces whois with a clean, interactive TUI.

What it does

Run quien example.com and you get an interactive tabbed interface:

• WHOIS — registrar, dates, nameservers, contacts, with relative timestamps (“2 years ago”)
• DNS — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, PTR, SOA, and DNSSEC status
• Mail — MX records, SPF, DMARC, and DKIM (probes common selectors)
• SSL/TLS — certificate details, expiry with days remaining, SANs
• HTTP — response headers from the final destination after following redirects, security headers prioritized
• Stack — CMS detection, WordPress plugin detection, JS/CSS framework detection, and external services parsed from the HTML

It also handles IP addresses. quien 8.8.8.8 shows the network owner, CIDR range, abuse contact, and reverse DNS.

How it works

quien uses RDAP as its primary lookup protocol — it’s the modern replacement for WHOIS that returns structured JSON instead of freeform text. An IANA bootstrap file maps TLDs to their RDAP servers, covering ~1,200+ TLDs out of the box. For TLDs without RDAP, it falls back to traditional WHOIS with automatic server discovery via IANA referral.

The tech stack detection fetches the page HTML and inspects it for known patterns — WordPress is identified through signals like wp-includes, REST API links, and Gutenberg block markers.

Every lookup retries automatically with exponential backoff. The TUI is built with bubbletea and lipgloss.

Install

brew tap retlehs/tap
brew install retlehs/tap/quien

Or with Go:

go install github.com/retlehs/quien@latest

Check it out at github.com/retlehs/quien.