Configurable Custom Jump Navigation

[uozalp]

Problem
K9s provides built-in navigation for standard Kubernetes resources (Deployment → Pods) and some popular operators. However, there are many niche operators and custom controllers where adding native navigation support for each would be impractical.

Teams developing their own operators need a way to quickly navigate between related CRs without manually switching views and filtering, but their use cases are too specific to justify native K9s support.

Proposed Solution
Allow users to define custom navigation rules in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/k9s/navigations.yaml:

jumps:
  "myoperator.io/v1/patchplans":
    targetGVR: "myoperator.io/v1/patchjobs"
    labelSelector: "app={{.metadata.name}}"

When pressing Enter on a PatchPlan, navigate to filtered PatchJobs instead of the describe view.

See PR for more details: #3736

[uozalp]

I originally built this feature for my own operator's CRDs, and the MariaDB example demonstrates how it works with third-party operators.
I've tested this feature with the following custom navigation configurations.

jumps:
  "kangalpatch.ozalp.dk/v1alpha1/patchplans":
    targetGVR: "kangalpatch.ozalp.dk/v1alpha1/patchjobs"
    labelSelector: "kangalpatch.ozalp.dk/patchplan={{.metadata.name}}"
    targetNamespace: all

  "karpenter.sh/v1/nodepools":
    targetGVR: "v1/nodes"
    labelSelector: "karpenter.sh/nodepool={{.metadata.name}}"
    targetNamespace: "all"

  "cert-manager.io/v1/certificates":
    targetGVR: "v1/secrets"
    fieldSelector: "metadata.name={{.metadata.name}}"
    targetNamespace: "{{.metadata.namespace}}"

  "k8s.mariadb.com/v1alpha1/mariadbs":
    targetGVR: "v1/pods"
    labelSelector: "app.kubernetes.io/instance={{.metadata.name}}"
    targetNamespace: "same"

[josh-brs]

@uozalp It would be useful to have templating in the targetGVR as well in particular for jumping to different resources from a namespaces view based on labels/annotations

[uozalp]

@josh-brs please see the PR

[evsl]

@uozalp Awesome work on the PR! I just happened to have a need to do this for my own CRDs for an operator I'm developing as well, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that there's already a PR up.

A suggestion that would be extremely useful would be if it were optionally possible for the same config options to live on the CRD resource itself via annotations. That way either cluster admins or CRD authors themselves could support adding custom jumps in k9s for their CRDs in multi-user environments without having to share/maintain config across various k9s users/installations.

I definitely know that I'd be incorporating that into my use case basically immediately so my team (which has quite a few k9s users) could also benefit from the utility this offers for our workload-specific CRDs

[younsl]

This is such a brilliant feature proposal! Custom jump navigation is something I've been wishing for a long time — the ability to instantly navigate from ExternalSecrets to Secrets, or ServiceMonitors to Services, would be a huge quality-of-life improvement for daily cluster operations.

I've already prepared my navigations.yaml in anticipation of this landing. Really looking forward to seeing this merged. Thank you @uozalp for the thoughtful design and implementation!

[uozalp]

Thanks @younsl
Hopefully @derailed has some time to take a look and can maybe be available for the next version.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 30 days with no activity.

[uozalp]

Remove stale