Quien — A better WHOIS lookup tool

What it does

Meet Quien, a compact, interactive WHOIS and domain reconnaissance tool that dresses up old-school lookups in a modern TUI. It surfaces WHOIS, RDAP, DNS, mail, SSL/TLS, HTTP headers and even tech-stack detection (think WordPress plugins, JS/CSS frameworks, third-party services parsed from HTML) in tabbed views. Quick, focused, and pleasantly clickable with a keyboard — it's the sort of small, useful upgrade that makes you wonder why this wasn't standard yesterday.

How to get it and run it

Install with Homebrew (brew tap retlehs/tap; brew install retlehs/tap/quien) or grab the Go build (go install github.com/retlehs/quien@latest). Launch interactively with quien or hand it a target: quien example.com or quien 8.8.8.8. Need machine-readable output? Use quien --json example.com or the JSON subcommands like quien dns, quien mail, quien tls, quien http, quien stack, or quien all for scripting and pipelines.

Under the hood and why it matters

Quien prioritizes RDAP lookups and falls back to WHOIS for broader TLD coverage, follows IANA referrals to find the right servers, and automatically retries with exponential backoff on flaky queries. That sounds dry, but in practice it means fewer dead ends during investigations and less fiddling with multiple tools. For security teams and solo sleuths alike, having IP reverse DNS, RDAP network info and abuse contacts plus tech-stack hints in one place can shave minutes — sometimes the crucial kind — off triage and footprinting work. Ripgrep made searching joyful; Quien tries to make domain reconnaissance the same.

Extras and integrations

Small touches matter: you can alias whois=quien to replace your default WHOIS client, and there's an agent skill (npx skills add retlehs/quien) to let autonomous agents or toolchains use Quien for lookups. Practical, not flashy. So: tired of cobbling together outputs from three different commands? Quien wants to tidy that mess up.

Sources: github.com/retlehs, Hacker News