In a previous post I've listed some of the new command line interface (cli) tools I started to use. Many of which are mainly faster or provide some extra highlighting.

However a few of the tools were interactive. I since learned that these go under the name text user interfaces (TUIs). I guess you could argue that vim and nano where some of the first in this field :) .

My previous list already included TUIs for git (lazygit) and data sheets (visidata).

Since than I discovered a whole lot more as well as some framework to help write them.

More TUIs

glow will render markdown on the command line for you. Obviously it cant change the font size, but it introduces text highlights and formatting and special characters that make reading markdown on the command line easier.

slides is something I'm going to try next, as I'm about to give a quick presentation at work about TUIs and what better way to do so than in the terminal itself :D.

termdbms seams to be a SQL client TUI.

There are many more I'm still discovering.

List of interesting tools:

• Kubelive kubernetes cluster management
• share-cli quick temporary file sharing
• emma-cli node package browser

TUI frameworks

Glow is written with on top of bubble tea and bubbles provides a set of typical UI components. I have not tried them myself, but it looks exciting. They also keep a list of apps written in it, which is a great way to discover more TUI apps.

Ink provides the same component-based UI building experience that React offers in the browser, but for command-line apps. This one I tried and wrote a hack news TUI for, which was fun and worked well.

garson introduces a lot of structure, but if that works for you it looks like much can be achieved in a few lines.

Quick DIY

Depending on the use case fzf can actually provide a TUI.

I wrote a simple bash script leveraging a jira cli app to first list all tickets, pipe that into fzf, which provides quick fuzzy finding, as well as allowing for arbitrary commands to run in order to produce a preview. Luckily the jira api also provides a cli view of tickets, which I could leverage as the fzf preview. Finally on select I open the ticket in the browser to handle more complex interactions:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e

# brew install ankitpokhrel/jira-cli/jira-cli fzf

ticket=$(jira issue list \
  --columns KEY,STATUS,SUMMARY,RESOLUTION,ASSIGNEE \
  --resolution x \
  --type ~Epic \
  --no-headers \
  --plain \
  | tr -s '\t' \
  | fzf --preview-window=up,70% --preview='jira issue view $(echo {} | cut -d "	" -f 1)' \
  | cut -d "	" -f 1)

jira open $ticket

Bonus

sttr not a TUI although it has an interactive component to help find string transformations, its main function is to transform text. This looks super useful for scripting in vim.