14 great tips to make amazing CLI applications

• cobra

  129 35,891 7.8 Go

  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

  157 11,675 8.7 Go

  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.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• clap-rs

  154 13,288 9.6 Rust

  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

  103 13,160 9.6 Rust

  Terminal session recorder 📹

  

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

• php-cli

  1 327 5.0 PHP

  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

  4 2,118 6.8 Go

  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

  148 46,981 8.3 Python

  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.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• bubbletea

  115 23,982 8.8 Go

  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

  26 7,331 7.8 Go

  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

  14 2,340 2.2 C

  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

  149 23,495 9.9 Python

  The lean application framework for Python. Build sophisticated user interfaces with a simple Python API. Run your apps in the terminal and 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

  13 2,827 1.6 C++

  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

  2 302 6.8 Go

  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

  74 25,756 8.8 Go

  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.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com sponsored

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

Suggest a related project