Homebrew: List only installed top level formulas - homebrew

Question

I'm looking for a way to show only the formulas I installed without the installed dependencies.
I want to have a list of all the programs I actually installed, without all noise of the dependencies.
I do know about brew list which lists all installed formulas.
I also know that brew graph gives me a dependency graph in the graphviz
Or in other words: I want to have the minimal set of formulas to reinstall my system.

Answer 1

Use brew leaves: show installed formulae that are not dependencies of another installed formula.

Answer 2

$ brew deps --installed
tmux: pkg-config libevent
q:
gdbm:
libxml2:
asciidoc: docbook
libevent:
pkg-config:
pcre:
docbook:
zsh: gdbm pcre
readline:
emacs: pkg-config
This seems to give us a list of all installed formulae including their dependencies. We can build a list of all formulae and a list of all dependencies and subtract the dependencies from the list of formulae, this should give us a list of formulae which are not dependencies of other formulae:
$ cat brew-root-formulae.sh
#!/bin/sh
brew deps --installed | \
awk -F'[: ]+' \
'{
packages[$1]++
for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++)
dependencies[$i]++
}
END {
for (package in packages)
if (!(package in dependencies))
print package
}'
.
$ ./brew-root-formulae.sh
zsh
asciidoc
libxml2
readline
tmux
q
emacs
Is this the output you are after?

Answer 3

The question is quite old, but actually only this answer resolves the issue. However, it's more like a workaround. But there's one more solution available out-of-the-box in brew:
brew bundle dump --file -
From docs:
brew bundle dump:
Write all installed casks/formulae/images/taps into a Brewfile in the
current directory.
and the flag:
--file
Read the Brewfile from this location.
Use --file=- to pipe to stdin/stdout.
As a result we get e.g.:
tap "homebrew/bundle"
tap "homebrew/cask"
tap "homebrew/cask-fonts"
tap "homebrew/core"
tap "homebrew/services"
tap "jesseduffield/lazydocker"
tap "jesseduffield/lazygit"
brew "lazydocker"
brew "lazygit"
cask "font-sauce-code-pro-nerd-font"
If you e.g. need a pure list of formulae and casks, without taps, you can just run:
brew bundle dump --file - | grep '^brew\|^cask' | sed 's/.* "\(.*\)".*$/\1/'
and get:
lazydocker
lazygit
font-sauce-code-pro-nerd-font
P.S. If you actually save the output to the file (with brew bundle dump or brew bundle dump --file PATH_TO_FILE), you can easily install all the dependencies from it with brew bundle install:
brew bundle [install]:
Install and upgrade (by default) all dependencies from the Brewfile.
You can specify the Brewfile location using --file or by setting the
HOMEBREW_BUNDLE_FILE environment variable.

Answer 4

this shows installed formulas as a tree.
brew deps --installed --tree
only show dependencies one level down
brew deps --1 --installed --tree
only show installed php formula
brew deps --installed --tree php
opens a website for visualization
brew deps --installed --graph php