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by odammit 3314 days ago
Serverless (https://serverless.com) has a nice experience. I believe it is built using inquirer.js (https://github.com/SBoudrias/Inquirer.js)

I've recently built an internal tool with inquirer and it was a really nice development and user experience. I haven't figured out the best way to test the interactions though.

termUI in go is also nice if you need graphing and viz for a dashboard like command line.

2 comments

I think many/most Node TUI's use Inquirer. I have mixed feelings about it. Python has several library's that provide lower-level constructs for building CLI and TUI's. Then they provide examples for using the library to implement a common pattern or prompt. Inquirer gives you some ready-made prompts but doesn't provide any help/convenience for creating your own prompt. It seems like the wrong level of abstraction.
Which python libraries do you prefer?

Inquirer is def the HTML inputs of the terminal but I got pretty far with it. My use case was Fairly Simpleā„¢ though. What other UI components do you think it's lacking?

I like python_prompt_toolkit, though I think the learning curve can be a bit steep. It gives you a ton of flexibility, which I really appreciate, but I have a hard time remembering how all the pieces interact. I hope I don't sound overly critical of people's open source work, because I've used and really appreciate both Inquirer and PPT. Just seems like there's yet to be a canonical library for this problem set.
It'd be really nice to see one in go or something else I could ship around easily w/o needing NPM and node, etc.

I'll give PPT a swing. I haven't used it before. Thanks!

I can second Serverless. Apart from being quite a powerful tool, it also has a nice experience overall.