What is witr used for?

witr is a command-line and terminal UI tool that explains why a process, port, container or file exists by tracing it back to the chain that started it. It is a good fit for investigating unexpected processes, finding what holds a port open, and incident response and troubleshooting.

Yes. witr is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at pranshuparmar/witr and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. witr is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What are some alternatives to witr?

Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include assh, golangci-lint and Apprise. SaaS products in the same category include GoLand, act101 and Amicro.

Is witr actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to witr was on 15 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.3.3, published on 24 June 2026. The project has 23k stars on GitHub.

witr: open-source developer tools

About witr

This entry covers witr, a tool by Pranshu Parmar that answers a single question: why is this running? Given a process, port, container or file, it traces the cause back through supervisors, services, containers and shells, so the person investigating does not have to piece the story together by hand.

Existing tools such as ps, top, lsof, ss, systemctl and docker ps show state and metadata, but leave the user to infer the cause by correlating several outputs. witr makes that causality explicit in a single human-readable output, as machine-readable JSON, or in an interactive TUI dashboard. A browser-based tutorial and sandbox lets you investigate a simulated Linux box without installing anything.

witr ships as one static binary covering Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Windows, and is also packaged through managers such as Homebrew, Conda and Winget. It is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. It suits sysadmins, SREs and developers troubleshooting unexpected processes or occupied ports.

Key features

Traces processes and ports to their origin
Explains containers and files too
Human-readable and JSON output
Interactive TUI dashboard
Single static binary
Runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Windows

Good fit for

→Investigating unexpected processes
→Finding what holds a port open
→Incident response and troubleshooting

Built with: Go; Docker; Kubernetes
Tags: cli; tui; process-management; troubleshooting; sysadmin; incident-response; observability; golang; devops

witr: questions and answers

What is witr used for?: witr is a command-line and terminal UI tool that explains why a process, port, container or file exists by tracing it back to the chain that started it. It is a good fit for investigating unexpected processes, finding what holds a port open, and incident response and troubleshooting.
Is witr open source?: Yes. witr is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at pranshuparmar/witr and is written mainly in Go.
Is witr free?: Yes. witr is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What are some alternatives to witr?: Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include assh, golangci-lint and Apprise. SaaS products in the same category include GoLand, act101 and Amicro.
Is witr actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to witr was on 15 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.3.3, published on 24 June 2026. The project has 23k stars on GitHub.