# A terminal for everyone

> Whether you’re a power user, an AI-assisted builder, or a visual navigator, we’ve designed Datum’s command line interface for you.

I’ve been using the terminal for most of my career. Bash scripts for infrastructure automation, ad-hoc diagnostics, moving through the filesystem without lifting my hands from the keyboard. It’s a productivity unlock the industry seems increasingly eager to replace with a button.

When I started with Kubernetes back in 2016, kubectl felt like a natural extension. Navigating cluster resources, editing manifests in place, and piping output into grep quickly became muscle memory.

Then in 2022, someone introduced me to k9s. At first, I was skeptical. After all, I was fast enough at typing kubectl commands that a TUI felt like overhead. Fast forward a week and I was using it as my daily driver: grabbing logs, viewing events in real-time, and jumping between namespaces without leaving the terminal or chaining together commands.

The terminal has gone through a few of these shifts as preferences have evolved and more people from different backgrounds adopt the terminal. I see three main personas:

1.  Command-line power users who live in muscle memory 
2.  Visual navigators who want a TUI over raw commands 
3.  AI builders who’d rather describe what they want than remember the right syntax 

We built [datumctl ](https://www.datum.net/download/datumctl)to serve all three.

For power users, datumctl provides the kubectl-style commands you already know, such as get, apply, delete, and diff. You don’t have to absorb a new mental model or set of UX patterns. Since it automatically discovers which projects and organizations you have access to, there’s no manual context configuration. From there, the api-resources command shows you what’s available in your current context and the explain command walks you through any resource before you touch it.

![Screenshot of the datumctl AI](https://grateful-excitement-dfe9d47bad.media.strapiapp.com/image_30_b215881913.png)


For visual navigation, we built datumctl console. Open it up and you’ll find a k9s-style terminal UI scoped to your Datum Cloud context. It auto-discovers the resources available based on where you’re looking: project-scoped resources when you’re in a project, org-scoped resources at the org level. You can login, switch projects, browse resources, view activity, and manage quotas (among other things) with a keyboard-first, no browser tab experience. If you’ve used k9s, this pattern should click right away, which is the point! 

![Screenshot of datumctl console](https://grateful-excitement-dfe9d47bad.media.strapiapp.com/image_4_574fae053e.png)

We also built datumctl ai, available standalone or directly from the console, because sometimes asking is faster than typing. Whether you want to understand what’s running across your projects, learn how to accomplish something new, or just get an answer without composing the right chain of commands, you can ask in natural language and get an answer in a few seconds.

![Screenshot of AI chat in action](https://grateful-excitement-dfe9d47bad.media.strapiapp.com/image_22_606c71bde7.png)

The terminal has always rewarded people who know it well, and with datumctl we’re working to make sure it works for all kinds of users.