Quien – A better WHOIS lookup tool

Source: Hacker News

A better WHOIS lookup tool. Interactive TUI with tabbed views for WHOIS, DNS, mail, SSL/TLS, HTTP headers, and tech stack detection.

Install

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

Or with Go:

go install github.com/retlehs/quien@latest

Usage

# Interactive prompt
quien

# Domain lookup (interactive TUI)
quien example.com

# IP address lookup
quien 8.8.8.8

# JSON output
quien --json example.com

Features

• RDAP-first lookups with WHOIS fallback for broad TLD coverage
• IANA referral for automatic WHOIS server discovery
• Tech stack detection including WordPress plugins, JS/CSS frameworks, and external services parsed from HTML
• IP lookups with reverse DNS, network info, and abuse contacts via RDAP
• Automatic retry with exponential backoff on all lookups
• JSON subcommands for scripting: quien dns, quien mail, quien tls, quien http, quien stack, quien all

Tip: If you want quien to replace your default WHOIS tool, add an alias to your shell config:

alias whois=quien

Agent skill

Add quien as an agent skill so agents can use it for domain and IP lookups:

npx skills add retlehs/quien