pkg VS blessed

I don't remember the details, and cannot find my notes on vercel/pkg. But looking at https://github.com/vercel/pkg right now I see the project has been deprecated in favour of single-executable-applications

> Standalone CLI — we haven’t worked on a standalone CLI for the new engine yet, but will absolutely have it before the v4.0 release.

This part is the most exciting to me. Given the rest of the release announcement, I'm assuming this means that it'll be built in Rust rather than embed Node. While I'm not a Rust zealot of anything, I'm very partial to not embedding Node. Particularly when it depends on using Vercel's now-abandoned pkg[1] tool.`

[1] https://github.com/vercel/pkg

The npm package called "pkg" seems to be the standard for packaging NodeJS applications

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg

Unfortunately you also need to bundle all your code into a single file for it to work, but you can use any bundler (webpack, parcel, etc) you want at least

Nodejs support for "single executable applications" is getting there - this issue below is preventing wider adoption at the moment:

"The single executable application feature currently only supports running a single embedded script using the CommonJS module system."

https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html

Should be an awesome game changer for node.js when the feature gets rounded out.

Also check out vercel's `pkg`: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1291

Yes, you can. Check out pkg for a fun option, which can package up your project and Node.js into a single executable.

Further, you could experiment with the pkg tool that allows you to package up Node JS, your source, and your dependencies into one single executable for easy distribution.

package the app using https://github.com/vercel/pkg and use a smaller base image like alpine, busybox or even scratch (if possible)

Check this thread: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1685

I found blessed but it seems like it was last updated 8 years ago. So what are my options?

So far I found this library github.com/chjj/blessed which is very powerful, I need to render animated charts and other complex objects and for my purpose it is doing well.

Alas https://github.com/chjj/blessed/issues/418#issuecomment-1533...

I considered blessed for a recent project, but ended up just simplifying the approach & making do with Inquirer + Meow instead due to the maintenance status. Haven't found anything else equivalent to blessed, other than Ink.

Inquirer is still probably the library that is most similar, if you are looking for comparisons to existing tools. My goal was to create a set of tools that uses the terminal window for a single operation at a time. The UI providing as much contextual information as possible to the user to know what actions they can perform, and any relevant information. A bit like a "choose your adventure" via terminal app sort of thing. Explicitly trying to stay clear of full screen and dashboard type stuff, like what blessed provides.

Not exactly a shell scripting framework, but y’all should check out blessed js. Weirdly enough I just found it yesterday and shit goes absolutely wild in the terminal

Perhaps you’d like a terminal based UI? https://github.com/chjj/blessed

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.

This is where libraries come in: https://github.com/chjj/blessed - this allows you to manage rendering in the terminal on your own, so you can have a scrolling box of text at the top and a "command line" at the bottom.

I was hoping to write my app in Rust as a learning exercise, but my alternative is https://www.npmjs.com/package/blessed, which is NodeJS. Ah well.

Using this https://github.com/chjj/blessed