Fresh New GUI Features

Great tools don't get in your way, they fade into the background, helping you focus on what matters and bringing confidence to your workflow. This is the philosophy behind VLT's graphical user interface, designed not just to manage dependencies, but to make working with them feel frictionless, intuitive, and even a little delightful.

The GUI is a visual and interactive way to navigate your projects - a tool that adapts to your workflow, rather than forcing you to adapt to it.

Getting Started

Viewing your projects in the GUI is useful - but what if you could click to initialize a new project?

Now, you can. With one action, you’re up and running. No need to juggle commands or manually configure settings. It just works.

Unlocking Dependency Management

Managing dependencies should be as easy in the GUI as it is in our CLI (if not far simpler). The latest version of the GUI removes unnecessary context switching, allowing you to add & remove dependencies inline with a single click.

Introducing Saved Queries

Dependencies aren’t just installed; they form a complex, evolving structure. Queries help you understand them.

What are Queries?

Queries are at the core of the GUI experience. Leveraging our unique graph capabilities you are able to write CSS-like query selectors to traverse your project's dependency tree. This unified approach unlocks infinite possibilities.

That said, we've recently made queries even more powerful by letting you save, revisit, and share them.

Saved Queries

As you navigate your projects you'll notice that the Query Bar updates in realtime making it easier for you to learn how to read and write these selectors. To compliment this experience, we've now introduced a bookmarking feature that let's you save queries for future use.

We've also introduced a new "Saved Queries" section that enables you to quickly access and manage previously saved queries. You can update, add labels or even run the query right from this view.

Project-Specific vs. Globally Accessible Saved Queries

A highlight of this new "Save Queries" feature is the ability to save either project-specific or globally accessible Queries.

You can save a Project-Specific Query by defining a directory field, or leave it blank to make the query Globally Accessible.

As you navigate to a project, you will see that Project-Specific & Globally Accessible Saved Queries populate the sidebar for quick navigation.

What if two queries are identical — one being Project-Specific, the other Globally Accesible?

When there are more than one saved queries that match the current selector we show a count of those Saved Queries alonside a deduplicated set of labels in the Query Bar.

A helper showing the count of queries and labels that matches the users selection

Labels - Bringing Meaning to your Queries

Labels add context to your saved queries. By default, we provide three out of the box:

🔴 Insecure
🔵 Outdated
🟡 Unstable

You can easily customize these or add your own.

Pro-tip: Labels are a great way to filter through a large list of Saved Queries using the key=value syntax as a filter.

Dashboard Tables and Cards

We've upgraded the dashboard to provide more clarity and control when navigating your projects. A new toggle allows you to switch between a card and a table view within the dashboard.

Tables are historically a great way to visualize long lists of information and now allow you to sort by project metadata such as the directory, version, and module type.

Expect to encounter tables in views where metadata-rich information is present

Digging Deeper - Dependency Insights

As you traverse your dependency tree in the Explorer view, the selected item is now populated with some useful metadata, which makes clicking around that much more compelling. New insights include:

🖼️ Package Icon
👤 Author
📥 Downloads
📆 Published Date & Time
✅ Version & Spec

A screenshot of the gui showing metadata on a selected package

Other Quality of Life Improvements

✔ Project resolution now finds more projects on your system
✔ Dependency specs are now clearer
✔ Resolved versions stand out
✔ Card stacking highlights multiple resolution paths

What's to come?

Expanding the Query Selector Syntax

We're continuously adding new pseudo selectors and states to our Query Selector Syntax. We're currently working on:

Pseudo Selectors

:semver – Match specific semantic versions
:outdated – Instantly detect outdated dependencies

Pseudo States & Metadata

Downloads
Published Date and Time
Issues and PR Counts
Security Insights and Advisories

Try It Today!

You can start using these new GUI features with your projects today by running:

# use npx
$ npx vlt gui

# Or install globally
$ npm i -g vlt
$ vlt gui

# Note: the irony is _still_ not lost on us