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Top 23 C CLI Projects
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Project mention: Shunpo: Minimalist bash tool to make directory navigation a little bit faster | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-26
I use https://github.com/jarun/nnn/ with `cd` on quit if I need to scan around manually. Otherwise, zoxide.
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GoAccess
GoAccess is a real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.
I use https://goaccess.io/ to parse the logs and generate a html report.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there is a lot of bot activity there, that using JS might cleanup a bit.
If you are interested, I have a write up of my setup here, with the report generation down at the bottom:
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hstr
bash and zsh shell history suggest box - easily view, navigate, search and manage your command history.
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Project mention: Release v3.0.10–panda panda panda panda panda · dankamongmen/notcurses | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-10-02
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playerctl
🎧 mpris media player command-line controller for vlc, mpv, RhythmBox, web browsers, cmus, mpd, spotify and others.
MPRIS is an under-appreciated standard and a great example of how different technologies on the open desktop should integrate with one another.
For example, there's <https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl>, which can control any MPRIS-compatible client: VLC, web browsers, different music players, mpd (with a plugin), etc.
MPRIS can also be used to e.g. allow controlling playback without unlocking the screen - the screen locker itself doesn't need elaborate support, something as simple as slock could be hacked to recognise a key combo and call out to playerctl; more fancy login managers/lockers could talk DBUS/MPRIS directly and even e.g. display album artwork.
Unfortunately, the standard doesn't seem to specify a simple way to indicate whether video is being played back, which could be a saner way to inform the screen locker; the actual protocol to directly inhibit locking is unfortunately a little bit insane.
Read the spec, there's probably some interesting ideas to explore: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/latest/
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Project mention: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-07-02
A couple more:
https://wayland.emersion.fr/mako/
https://makoframework.com/
It can be hard sometimes to come up with names that aren't already in use. I think as long as it's clear in the description what it is, and the same name isn't shared for two projects that do approximately the same thing, maybe it's not so bad.
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smenu
smenu started as a lightweight and flexible terminal menu generator, but quickly evolved into a powerful and versatile CLI selection tool for interactive or scripting use.
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What I like doing is using ttyplot and then it supports many commands and you can even specify an extraction param to plot on so then it's very Unix philosophy.
https://github.com/tenox7/ttyplot
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breadboard-os
A firmware platform aimed at quick prototyping, built around FreeRTOS and a feature-packed CLI
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C CLI discussion
C CLI related posts
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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
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Duck – Disk usage analysis tool with an interactive command line interface
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Show HN: Interactive systemd (a better way to work with systemd units)
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I deleted all of my email filters
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Building Static HTML Pages with JSX Server-Side Rendering
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Tig: Text-Mode Interface for Git
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tarman - tar.gz package manager
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 18 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source CLI projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | nnn | 20,068 |
| 2 | GoAccess | 19,337 |
| 3 | hstr | 4,214 |
| 4 | notcurses | 3,892 |
| 5 | neomutt | 3,403 |
| 6 | chafa | 3,385 |
| 7 | fzy | 3,063 |
| 8 | ProcDump-for-Linux | 3,017 |
| 9 | playerctl | 2,624 |
| 10 | mako | 2,453 |
| 11 | smenu | 2,421 |
| 12 | tio | 2,378 |
| 13 | termbox | 1,978 |
| 14 | clifm | 1,421 |
| 15 | ttyplot | 1,204 |
| 16 | slurp | 1,024 |
| 17 | zpl | 1,022 |
| 18 | imgcat | 897 |
| 19 | rdrview | 877 |
| 20 | pick | 829 |
| 21 | bcal | 658 |
| 22 | 2048.c | 622 |
| 23 | breadboard-os | 565 |
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