List Installed Packages With Brew

The short answer

To get a list of all the CLI and GUI packages installed with Homebrew, you can use the following brew command:

 $ brew list

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Alternatively, you can use the --formula flag to list the CLI packages only:

 $ brew list --formula

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Or the --cask flag to list the GUI packages only,

 $ brew list --cask

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Checking an installed package

To check whether a particular package is already installed, you can append the package name to the brew list command as follows:

 $ brew list <package>

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Which will either output the local path of the package if it is installed:

 $ brew list tree
 /usr/local/Cellar/tree/2.0.4/bin/tree
 /usr/local/Cellar/tree/2.0.4/share/man/man1/tree.1

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Or an error message otherwise:

 $ brew list awf
 Error: No such keg: /usr/local/Cellar/awf

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Remind yourself of the syntax using AI Command Search

If you’re using Warp as your terminal, you can easily retrieve this command using the Warp AI Command Search feature:

Entering verify vim installed with brew in the AI Command Search prompt results in brew list vim, which you can then quickly insert into your shell by doing CMD+ENTER.

List the versions of installed packages

Since Homebrew allows you to install and manage multiple versions of a package at the same time, you can use the --versions flag to get a list of all the installed packages including their version numbers:

 $ brew list --versions

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Alternatively, you can filter out this list by only printing the list of packages with multiple versions installed using the --multiple flag:

 $ brew list --versions --multiple

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Finally, to get the version numbers of a particular package, you can append the package name at the end of this command:

 $ brew list --versions <package>

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Note that all of these above commands can be combined with the --formula and --cask flags as follows:

 $ brew list --versions --multiple --formula

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