Homebrew is how I install most things on my Mac. I built Toji for two reasons. I wanted my apps and tools to stay up to date on their own, without having to remember to run updates in a terminal. And I wanted an easy way to look things up in Homebrew’s library: search everything it offers, read what a package is, and install it from there.
Toji is a native Mac app built on top of Homebrew. Everything it does is what Homebrew would do, and anything done in the terminal shows up in it.
Updates
- Toji checks on a schedule from the menu bar, even with its window closed. You can update one thing, a selection, or everything.
- Each update is marked major, minor, patch or rebuild, with release notes when the project publishes them.
- A desktop widget shows how many updates are waiting, and Shortcuts, Spotlight and Siri can check for updates or run them.
- It can install updates on its own between hours you choose. Open apps wait, and so does everything on battery or in Low Power Mode.
- For an app that is open, Toji can quit it, update it and open it again.
Looking things up
Discover searches everything Homebrew offers, by name or by what it is for, and shows what a package is before you install it. Packages from taps you trust can be installed from there too.
Careful by default
- After each update, Toji checks that the new version is installed before anything old is removed. If an update fails, nothing is removed.
- The previous version of a command-line tool is kept for a day, so you can go back to it.
- Clean Up lists exactly what would be removed first, and other copies go to the Trash rather than being deleted.
- A Brewfile is read, never run: Toji takes only the package names, and leaves out packages from taps Homebrew does not trust.
- Before installing a new version of itself, Toji checks the download was signed by the same developer as the copy you have.
Everything else
The rest of the app is a plain view of what Homebrew has done: apps and tools kept apart from the libraries they depend on, storage ranked by size, a timeline of every change, background services with a switch, taps, and a list of issues with each one explained. A setup can be saved to a file and restored on another Mac. The interface is in English, French and Japanese, and every control is labelled for VoiceOver.
Toji is free, and runs on macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon and Intel.