DuckDB ships with a solid REPL, but a REPL isn’t a client. Once you’re running CTEs longer than your scrollback, paging through result sets, or flipping between schemas, you want a proper UI — without leaving the terminal. Quack is that UI: a CLI client built around DuckDB first.
DuckDB-Native by Design
Quack is written in Rust and treats DuckDB as its primary engine. Point it at a .duckdb file and you get everything the DuckDB ecosystem offers — CSV, Parquet, and JSON reads, views, indexes, user-defined functions — surfaced in a TUI instead of a bare prompt.
cargo install quack-sql
quack path/to/analytics.duckdb
You can also connect to SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL from the same session, but the experience is tuned for DuckDB workflows.
What the REPL Doesn’t Give You
A schema explorer. Press Ctrl+S for a tree view of catalogs, schemas, tables, views, indexes, and functions. Expand, jump to definition, and paste identifiers into the editor without typing them.
A real editor. Modal vim-style editing with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and multi-line buffers. Write the kind of query you’d actually commit, not the kind you type once.
A results browser. Paginated tables with sorting, filtering, column aggregates, and sparklines. Export to CSV, Parquet, or JSON from the result pane.
Tabs and persistence. Multiple editor tabs per session. Close Quack, reopen it, and your tabs, buffers, and query history come back.
A command palette. Ctrl+P opens 40+ actions, plus your own SQL snippets.
The DuckDB Query You Actually Wrote
Because Quack delegates SQL execution to DuckDB itself, dialect behavior matches what you’d get at the duckdb CLI. Read a Parquet file directly:
SELECT region, SUM(amount) AS total
FROM read_parquet('s3://bucket/orders/*.parquet')
GROUP BY region
ORDER BY total DESC;
Attach another DuckDB database, query a view, or call an extension function — whatever DuckDB supports, Quack runs.
Install
Cargo, Homebrew, or prebuilt binaries from the Quack GitHub repository. No accounts, no telemetry, no browser dependency.
If You Want the Full GUI
Quack is the terminal client in the PondPilot family. The PondPilot App is the same DuckDB engine in a browser, if you want to hand a colleague a URL instead of a binary.