Proposal: Extend npkill beyond node_modules with developer profiles

[zaldih]

Hi everyone!

As the release of npkill v1.0 approaches, I’ve been thinking about the future of the project—and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For years, npkill has had a very clear and focused identity:

"Easily find and remove old and heavy node_modules folders ✨"

And that simplicity is what has made it so useful.

But over time, we’ve seen users adopt it for other use cases and ecosystems. Some have even created language-specific forks like npkill-rs or tools like killposer (PHP).

That gave me an idea:
What if npkill could support developers from any ecosystem out of the box?

💡 Proposal summary

• Introduce predefined developer profiles (--profiles) such as python, java, rust, dotnet, etc.
• Each profile would automatically target common heavy folders for that stack (e.g., __pycache__, .venv, build, target, etc.)
• Profiles could be selected via CLI (--profiles python) or from within the TUI.
• The default behaviour, in addition to node_modules, will look for other directories in the ecosystem, such as .angular or .next.

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❓ Open questions for the community

• Would this dilute the tool's core identity too much?
• Should this be a part of npkill?
• Are there other profiles you'd find useful?
• What folders should/shouldn't be included in each?
• How do you think this should be implemented?

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📖 Full blog post

• 🇬🇧 English: The Future of npkill: Beyond node_modules
• 🇪🇸 Español: Reflexión sobre el futuro de npkill

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Thanks for reading—and for all your support over the years 🙌
I’d really love to hear your feedback.