yay

Yay is a command-line tool for Arch Linux, a do-it-yourself flavor of Linux. Its name stands for "Yet Another Yogurt" and it is written in Go. To understand what it does, you need two bits of background. Arch Linux installs software with a tool called pacman. There is also a community-run collection called the AUR, the Arch User Repository, where users share build recipes for software not available through official channels. Yay is an AUR helper: it puts both sources behind a single interface, so you can search for, install, and update software whether it comes from the official repositories or the AUR.

The README lists what yay handles on your behalf. It resolves package dependencies, downloads the build instructions, offers tab completion for AUR package names, and asks for all your input before any building starts so you are not interrupted mid-process. It can narrow searches step by step, let you choose among packages that provide the same thing, clean up build-only dependencies when done, and vote or unvote for packages on the AUR.

Installation is a one-time bootstrap. Because yay is not in the official repositories, you first install some basic build tools, clone its recipe from the AUR, and build it with the standard makepkg command. The README provides the exact commands, including a chained one-liner version. You can also grab a precompiled binary variant instead of building from source, or install yay directly via pacman on distributions like Manjaro that package it.

Day-to-day use mirrors pacman's familiar flags. Running yay with no arguments updates the whole system. Typing a search term brings up a selection menu. There are also options for tracking development packages whose names end in -git, which update based on the latest code from their source repositories.

The README includes a table of common commands and an extensive FAQ section covering colored output, diff display behavior, limiting operations to AUR or official packages, and how the development package update cache works. Support is handled through GitHub issues, as yay is not officially backed by Arch Linux.