plop VS enquirer

Almost all of us, while working on a project, are copy/pasting from the previous one while creating similar structures. While thinking if there is a fast way to do this, I came across plop js.

In this article, I will talk about Plop, which is a little tool that saves you time and helps your team build new files with consistency, as the documentation suggests.

My tool of choice is Plop.js. Plop is a powerful "micro-generator framework" built to help maintain patterns as well as speed up your project build time. From the documenation:

Plop

When it comes to software development, a good developer experience (or DX) is a key aspect in helping the development process to become faster and more efficient. Having a good DX means that developers are focusing on the real deal while other, less important stuff, is being taken care of by automated tools. Such a tool is Plop which I really love for its simplicity and efficiency.

this allows you to import this Header component with import { Header } from 'path/Header' without Header/Header. Creating this structure manually is annoying, so one will benefit from some code generators like plop or hygen.

plop for create a consistent templates for pages, components, etc

Plop

Although I'm happy there is a way to bundle Node.js apps with support for pnpm, and for a modern-ish version of Node.js, it's somewhat slow in my experience to build locally. Interactivity doesn't have the greatest ecosystem there, especially with TypeScript. Best library I've found is Enquirer.

{ "name": "@jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "description": "Recursively omit specified keys from an object", "tags": ["object", "deep", "remove", "omit"], "version": "0.3.0", "author": "Jon Schlinkert (https://github.com/jonschlinkert)", "repository": "jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "bugs": "https://github.com/jonschlinkert/omit-deep/issues", "license": "MIT" }

In case you need to ask for user input, optionally you can use a prompt file. This is very useful to customize the output of the generator. Prompts are defined using a library named Enquirer.

> I don't fully understand why packages like this are so popular.

It actually works like this: Author X develops `iseven`, `isodd`, etc. No one really downloads such packages. Author X then develops `importantPackage` which does do something useful developers out here download. Now `iseven`, `isodd` are downloaded alongside `importantPackage`.

My point is, we should recognize certain NPM authors as toxic, but I guess "freedom of speech/code" stops us from doing so. Example of such an author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/

something like enquirer

You're thinking of Jon Schlinkert, publisher of 1435 packages on npm.

It's insanely funny to me that these packages exist while one of his bigger projects (https://github.com/enquirer/enquirer) lists the following reason under "why use it":

> Lightweight - Only one dependency, the excellent ansi-colors by Brian Woodward.

It's written by this guy, who shits out micro libraries by the hundreds. He moved the project to another user under the pretense that he was learning to program back then, but a lot of his stuff is similarly inconsequential micro libraries.

Enquirer