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Show HN: Gum, a tool for glamorous shell scripts (github.com/charmbracelet)
55 points by maaslalani on July 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



So it's a beefed-up colorful alternative to `fzf + input + ncurses-like prompts` where you would use English descriptive subcommands instead of shell redirections.

Nice! Kudos.


I'm blown away by everything about this. The idea, execution, readme, packaging... everything. This feels like the slick lightweight zenity or yad for the terminal that I have always wanted - but actually better than I imagined. Can't wait to try this.


Thank you so much for the kind words! It really means a lot.


A lot of things Charm is doing is pretty neat, but until they're packaged by major distros (my home distro of Debian still has none of these; and for such a niche tooling, I'm not using your third party Debian repo), they're hard to fit into anything I expect to run anywhere.

Also, have you ever considered rolling your own pager that can self file watch and remember scroll position across watch iterations? The Glow markdown reader is neat, but I'd like to use it with vim in a way where :w automatically refreshes Glow running in another tmux pane.


Or just run it directly from your script on any platform/arch that has go - no need for root to install an outdated distro specific package

    go run github.com/charmbracelet/gum@latest


I'm not big on using language-specific tooling. Programs need to be part of the package manager management loop of a distro to ever be adopted, especially for developers who don't use those languages.

Using language-specific package managers can only lead to out of date software, security bugs, and other nastiness. Same reason I don't install programs with pip, npm, or other crazy things.


Then do your part and become a maintainer. I don’t think that a small team of developers has cycles to do that at this point.


Basically, CLI tools like this one or fzf, rg, fd have to become popular and useful enough to win favour of distro maintainers.

When enough shell scripts state a dependency on `jq`, debian maintainers would be inclined to package it.


And they did. jq is packaged in Debian now.




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