figlet.js VS Commander.js

Commander.js provides a lot of features that allow you to succinctly build command-line interfaces. Furthermore, the Node.js community provides libraries such as Chalk and Figlet that complement Commander.js CLIs to make them look visually appealing.

I have a popular web based ascii text generator (patorjk.com/software/taag), it uses FIGlet driver that I wrote (https://github.com/patorjk/figlet.js/). Many of the other ones out there also use their own drivers (I've seen some written in php and python). There are also different types of ASCII text fonts out there other than FIGlet (ex: my app compiles fonts that were made in the AOL days in the Arial font - which is interesting because it's a non-monospaced font).

FIGlet is the most popular spec for these types of fonts though (it's an app and a spec). The mailing list hasn't been active in a decade, but people used to submit fonts there. It was cool to see what people made.

The oldami tool uses chalk to colorize the output and figlet for the banner.

Visit the Commander.js reference.

In the previous article, I looked at a Commander to configure and accept cli options and assign it to a variable called program.

You can write a command line utility using zx or commander.js. Hit a public api, spit stuff out in the console, etc.

In your index.js you can do whatever you want, even create an interactive CLI (check commander).

There is clearly a whole load of repetition, so this should be fairly easy to build and parameterise. Essentially this will all just be string building so we won't need to use any particular libraries for most of this script. We will need a way to call ffmpeg though - and ffmpeg will need to be present too, of course. To call a CLI command we can use the package commander.

Commander.js is an NPM package that makes it easier to build CLI tools. You can find its documentation over here

You can also use npm package commander to make more complex command line tool with lot of options and sub commands.

commander - npm - Required. A library that lets you define the commands and their arguments, options, help, etc.

Throughout my time writing and updating my static-site generator, I've been using npm from the very foundation I use an npm package called commander. Therefore, it is obvious that for the tool that I will be using to publish my ssg, I will do so with npm.

The command line has thousands of tools, such as awk, sed, grep, and find available at your disposal that cut development time and automate tedious tasks. Creating a command line tool in Node.js isn't very complicated, thanks to a powerful library like Commander.js.