14 great tips to make amazing CLI applications

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time
  • Revelo Payroll - Free Global Payroll designed for tech teams
  • Onboard AI - Learn any GitHub repo in 59 seconds
  • SonarQube - Static code analysis for 29 languages.
  • cobra

    A Commander for modern Go CLI interactions

    While it is fun to parse argv by hand, I go straight for full-featured command-line parsing frameworks like cobra in go, clap in rust, click in python, php-cli in PHP.

  • direnv

    unclutter your .profile

    environment variables. This has the added benefit of making your tool easy to integrate in CICD, and provide security by avoiding listing credentials in your command line. It also allows for easy customization per directory or project, using a tool like direnv.

  • InfluxDB

    Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time. Manage all types of time series data in a single, purpose-built database. Run at any scale in any environment in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

  • clap-rs

    A full featured, fast Command Line Argument Parser for Rust

    While it is fun to parse argv by hand, I go straight for full-featured command-line parsing frameworks like cobra in go, clap in rust, click in python, php-cli in PHP.

  • asciinema

    Terminal session recorder 📹

    Tools like asciinema are great to show real-life workflows.

  • php-cli

    PHP Console Application made easy- build great console apps with ease. Comes with Zero Dependency and Autocompletion support. Think of it as a PHP cli application framework. (by adhocore)

    While it is fun to parse argv by hand, I go straight for full-featured command-line parsing frameworks like cobra in go, clap in rust, click in python, php-cli in PHP.

  • glamour

    Stylesheet-based markdown rendering for your CLI apps 💇🏻‍♀️

    Consider using a pretty library to render markdown straight on the command line, for example glamour (golang) or rich (python).

  • rich

    Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.

    I had a great time with all the charmbracelet libraries, like bubbletea for building TUIs and lipbgloss for styling. rich is a similar, awesome python library.

  • Revelo Payroll

    Free Global Payroll designed for tech teams. Building a great tech team takes more than a paycheck. Zero payroll costs, get AI-driven insights to retain best talent, and delight them with amazing local benefits. 100% free and compliant.

  • bubbletea

    A powerful little TUI framework 🏗

    This can be as easy as wrapping a simple stdin/stdout loop with rlwrap, all the way to using full featured TUI libraries like bubbletea (golang), textual (python) or imtui (c++).

  • lipgloss

    Style definitions for nice terminal layouts 👄

    I had a great time with all the charmbracelet libraries, like bubbletea for building TUIs and lipbgloss for styling. rich is a similar, awesome python library.

  • rlwrap

    A readline wrapper

    This can be as easy as wrapping a simple stdin/stdout loop with rlwrap, all the way to using full featured TUI libraries like bubbletea (golang), textual (python) or imtui (c++).

  • textual

    Textual is a Rapid Application Development framework for Python. Build sophisticated user interfaces with a simple Python API. Run your apps in the terminal and (coming soon) a web browser!

    This can be as easy as wrapping a simple stdin/stdout loop with rlwrap, all the way to using full featured TUI libraries like bubbletea (golang), textual (python) or imtui (c++).

  • imtui

    ImTui: Immediate Mode Text-based User Interface C++ Library

    This can be as easy as wrapping a simple stdin/stdout loop with rlwrap, all the way to using full featured TUI libraries like bubbletea (golang), textual (python) or imtui (c++).

  • go-gh

    A Go module for interacting with gh and the GitHub API from the command line.

    Even simple shell script verbs provide great extension capability for users. For even bigger impact, provide a simple wrapper framework like gh does, that allows extensions written in go to easily call the main tool itself.

  • viper

    Go configuration with fangs

    configuration files. A few command line option libraries provide the option to use a configuration file alongside the command line parser (for example viper in golang). Otherwise, nothing is easier to use a JSON, YAML, or TOML parser to read in defaults and overrides.

  • Onboard AI

    Learn any GitHub repo in 59 seconds. Onboard AI learns any GitHub repo in minutes and lets you chat with it to locate functionality, understand different parts, and generate new code. Use it for free at www.getonboard.dev.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts