I Built a TUI Package Manager for AI Agent Skills — Here's Why
If you've been using AI coding agents for a while, you've probably collected a pile of SKILL.md files scattered across different folders. One for Claude Code, another for Cursor, maybe a third sitting in a GitHub repo you keep re-cloning every time you set up a new machine.
I got tired of that. So I built skmp — a full-screen TUI package manager for AI agent skills, inspired by how Homebrew and npm handle software packages, but purpose-built for the chaotic multi-harness world of agentic AI tools.
The Problem It Solves
Modern AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, pi, OpenCode — all support skills or custom instructions. The problem is that each tool expects them in a different directory, with no shared standard.
You end up with something like this:
~/.claude/skills/for Claude Code~/.codex/skills/for Codex~/.cursor/skills/for Cursor~/.agents/skills/for pi~/.gemini/antigravity-ide/skills/for Antigravity
Every time you install a new skill, you either manually copy it into each folder or you forget and wonder why it isn't available in half your tools.
skmp fixes this with a single store and symlinks:
~/.skmp/skills/ ← downloaded once, skmp owns this
↓ symlinked to
~/.agents/skills/
~/.claude/skills/
~/.codex/skills/
~/.cursor/skills/
~/.gemini/antigravity-ide/skills/
Install a skill once. It appears everywhere.
What It Looks Like
The interface is a split-pane terminal UI built with Bubble Tea and Lipgloss. On the left, a scrollable list of skills. On the right, a detail pane with the description, author, version, and tags. Four tabs let you switch between all skills, bundles, your installed skills, and your installed bundles.
Navigation is fully keyboard-driven in a vim-ish style:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
j / k |
move down / up |
K / J |
jump to top / bottom |
tab |
focus detail pane |
i / x |
install / remove |
/ |
search |
Install in Seconds
npm install -g skmp-cli
Or via Homebrew:
brew tap Nitesh000/tap
brew install skmp
Or grab a binary directly from the Releases page.
Once installed, just run skmp. It fetches the registry on first launch, caches it for 24 hours, and you're browsing.
The Registry Model
This is the part I'm most proud of architecturally. The registry is just a index.json file living in the GitHub repo, served directly from raw.githubusercontent.com. No CDN middleman, no server infrastructure to maintain.
Each entry is metadata only:
{
"name": "caveman",
"description": "Ultra-compressed communication mode. Cuts token usage ~75%.",
"author": "yuu",
"version": "1.0.0",
"source": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...",
"harnesses": ["claude-code", "pi", "codex"],
"tags": ["communication", "tokens"]
}
The actual skill files live in their author's own repository. skmp only stores the URL. This means:
Authors own their skills. You push an update to your repo, all users get it on next install.
The registry is just an index. No assets, no binary blobs, no storage costs.
Contributing is a one-PR process. Add your entry to
registry/index.json, open a PR, done.
How Search Works
Fuzzy full-text search is powered by Bleve, an embedded Go search library. The tricky part was handling skill names that contain hyphens and dots — by default, most text analyzers tokenize write-a-skill into three separate tokens (write, a, skill), which breaks exact name queries.
The fix was a custom Bleve analyzer using a keyword tokenizer (treats the whole string as one token) plus a to_lower filter. This means write-a-skill is indexed and searchable as a single unit. Hyphenated names, versioned names like tdd-v2, multi-word names — all work correctly.
The Harness Abstraction
Each AI tool skmp supports is called a harness. Harnesses are detected automatically at runtime by checking if a known binary is present on your $PATH.
| Harness | Binary Detected | Skills Path |
|---|---|---|
| pi | pi |
~/.agents/skills/ |
| Claude Code | claude |
~/.claude/skills/ |
| Antigravity | agy-ide |
~/.gemini/antigravity-ide/skills/ |
| Codex | codex |
~/.codex/skills/ |
| Cursor | cursor |
~/.cursor/skills/ |
| OpenCode | opencode |
registered in opencode.jsonc |
When you install a skill, skmp symlinks it into every harness it detects. If you install a new AI tool later, just run skmp sync to wire up your existing skills into the new harness automatically.
OpenCode is a special case — it doesn't read from a skills directory; it reads paths from its own config file. So skmp registers ~/.skmp/skills under skills.paths in ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc instead of symlinking.
What's Next
A few things on the roadmap:
Skill updates —
skmp upgradeto pull the latest version of every installed skillPrivate registries — point skmp at your own
index.jsonfor internal team skillsMore harnesses — Windsurf, Zed, and others as their skill systems mature
Try It
npm install -g skmp-cli
skmp
The repo is at github.com/Nitesh000/skmp. PRs, bug reports, and new skill submissions are all welcome — the contributing bar is intentionally low.
If you've got a skill you've been carrying around manually, consider submitting it to the registry. The whole point of skmp is that a skill you write once should be available everywhere with a single command.
