chalk VS yargs

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).

Your tool now automates project setup, but there's room for improvement. Consider adding more features or handling user input to customize the project structure. Explore packages like yargs for parsing command-line arguments. You can learn more about yargs through their official documentation here.

This code snippet uses yargs, a Node.js package, to parse command-line arguments in a POSIX-compliant way, including support for short and long-form options. You could also use the popular commander defined as a complete node.js command-line interface.

This feature was implemented by adding a new argument option -l or --lang in yargs as below.

Creating CLIs with yargs is a piece of cake. For LZ4 there is a streaming implementation on npm which is a single function and also happened to decompress my files without any errors. Everything else is out-of-box Node.js.

Backend is more tricky. - RESTful APIs I prefer Koajs - For a RPC/microsevice, I have only used gRPC - For a CLI, yargs and inquirer

To accomplish this task, I added a new option using the yargs module. This allows me to read whatever the user inputs after using -l/--l. Following this, I added a conditional statement that defaults to en-CA whenever a language code is not inputted.

You can build them from scratch, or use one of many specialized libraries on NPM, like commander, yargs, blessed, terminal kit, prompts, and many more.