chalk VS boxen

4. Chalk

Chalk: Provides an easy way to stylize terminal strings with various colors and text formatting in Node.js, aiding in creating visually appealing command-line outputs

Chalk is a popular choice for adding colors to CLI output while maintaining readability.

Librerías: Chalk winston, log4js

Today the most popular library and de facto standard is the chаlk. The chalk has rich functionality, is fast but not ideal. It lacks some useful features.

This is a new tutorial on how to create a command line interface application, and our application today is a Mortgage Calculator. I used in this program packages such as 1- inquirer for interactive questions and answers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/inquirer 2- Sqlite3 DBMS 3- Chalk for colorful output in the terminal: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk

One of the libraries I used most that went full-ESM is Chalk. They released v5 over a year-and-a-half ago (November 2021) with ESM-only support and haven't updated v4 - their last iteration that supported CommonJS - since. If you go into their GitHub Issues section, you'll see a number of issues raised about CommonJS support, most of which are just responded to with a link to a post they made about switching over. Fair enough. I guess if I had to constantly answer the same question over and over, I might do the same.

To colorize my logs, I used a chalk package and created a logger utility:

We will add some dependencies to help us deal with CLI behaviours (inquirer) and text coloring (chalk).

boxen

There are many tools available to help with styling your command line output. For my business card, I used a combination of boxen to draw the box around the content, and chalk to power the font styles and colours. I'll leave this part up to you, but you can view the code on GitHub to see how I did it. Be aware that if you want to use ES6 imports in Node, you'll need to update your index.js file extension to .mjs, and edit the package.json "bin" section accordingly.

Your CLI is complete now! One thing more that you can do is to decorate the output and errors with boxes and colors, we can do that using boxen and chalk.