kotter VS kotlinx-cli

You can check out my project https://github.com/varabyte/kotter if you want to see something that makes heavy use of extension functions (even though if you're a beginner using it, you probably wouldn't notice, because Intellij IDEA is so good about auto-importing things for you).

Actually, more often than not I was talking about this library: https://github.com/varabyte/kotter. With a smattering of https://github.com/varabyte/truthish.

I'm currently using Picnic and Mordant which are working nicely. I've tried out Kotter and Text-IO, but they either open a Swing terminal or require you to run a `.bat` script or something.

I'm not too sure how to answer your question about language features in Kotter. Except maybe to point you at its extensive README and large collection of examples.

The first few examples I wrote were fairly bland, basically shaping and testing features as I created them. text, anim, blink, and input are in that category. (Plus, Kotter didn't have unit tests in the early days; instead, I just ran those programs over and over and over again).

https://github.com/varabyte/kotter - A library for writing dynamic console applications.

You can find the project for the code here. As it's just an example project and not some final production codebase, so there's only a single source file in it, main.kt. It clocks in at 462 lines of code to accomplish everything you see above, and it took about a day.

Hey OP, maybe it's overkill for you to change the implementation at this point but I wrote https://github.com/varabyte/kotter which is a Kotlin terminal library that runs your app in a virtual terminal if it can't run otherwise (e.g. in the intellij terminal). You'd probably be able to use it as a backend for inquirer if you were interested.

Gotcha! I created https://github.com/varabyte/konsole/issues/63 based on this conversation. Feel free to review it and add anything I may not have captured.

In Kotlin, I've been having a great time with kotlinx-cli. No macros involved or magic involved, and it's closer to the author's own ideals.

(And some less good ones https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli, despite being official)

Not exactly sure what you're doing, but check out https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli which is an official multiplatform solution for parsing incoming options. If you can use it in your case, great! If not, you might at least be inspired by the API (and how extensive even a "simple" idea can get).

For CLI programs in Kotlin, I suggest taking a look at kotlinx-cli or, especially, Clikt, for idiomatic Kotlin code without annotations and such. Of course, after having already written the program, you're most likely not gonna switch that out, but I just wanted to inform you about that.

What about the official command line parser from jetbrains? https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli

I think, you can use libs for that. ex: Clikt, kotlinx.cli, picocli

Nice work! Welcome to Kotlin, it’s quickly becoming my favourite language. (Former PHP, current Java dev here). You should check out https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli if you want to take it to the next level.

There is https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx-cli but you'll have to weigh this against quality and completeness of third party efforts as you've already discovered (in any case you'll probably need multiple libraries).