Why no DAML Navigator in dpm?

Why was the DAML Navigator deprecated and not included in dpm?
Was it simply not worth the effort to maintain a GUI tool for development only, or the newer versions of had features that would be better suited for a CLI tool (like daml shell)?

I checked out some videos of it online, which also made me wonder why it didn’t exist as a deployed tool, logging into it and interacting with contracts, viewing active contracts etc.

Was also curious if there would be people who would be interested in using if that tool existed

Daml Navigator actually was deprecated in the 2.x Daml stack and discontinued with 3.x

Warning

Since Daml 2.9.0, daml navigator is deprecated. It will be removed in Daml 3.0.

docs.daml.com

Visualize: Daml Navigator (Deprecated) — Daml SDK 2.10.4 documentation

it was a dev-only tool, and with significant changes in 3.x it is not part of the core stack and was not deemed worth the continued investment in maintenance as a generic utility.

If you mainly miss the ability to quickly inspect a ledger during development, many teams build a lightweight internal admin UI tailored to their templates rather than relying on a generic explorer. That tends to be easier to maintain and far more useful because it can display business-specific information instead of raw contract fields.

Some possible alternative approaches include:

With 3.x you also have localnet / cn-quickstart – which include a GUI component, and which include the more representative localnet experience standing in for the full Canton Network.

github.com Canton Network Docs

LocalNet - Canton Network Docs

Run a multi-validator Canton Network locally with Docker Compose for development and integration testing.