Gum: A Go-powered tool for writing shell scripts, no Go code required

3 months ago 2

A tool for glamorous shell scripts. Leverage the power of Bubbles and Lip Gloss in your scripts and aliases without writing any Go code!

The above example is running from a single shell script (source).

Gum provides highly configurable, ready-to-use utilities to help you write useful shell scripts and dotfiles aliases with just a few lines of code. Let's build a simple script to help you write Conventional Commits for your dotfiles.

Ask for the commit type with gum choose:

gum choose "fix" "feat" "docs" "style" "refactor" "test" "chore" "revert"

Note

This command itself will print to stdout which is not all that useful. To make use of the command later on you can save the stdout to a $VARIABLE or file.txt.

Prompt for the scope of these changes:

gum input --placeholder "scope"

Prompt for the summary and description of changes:

gum input --value "$TYPE$SCOPE: " --placeholder "Summary of this change" gum write --placeholder "Details of this change"

Confirm before committing:

gum confirm "Commit changes?" && git commit -m "$SUMMARY" -m "$DESCRIPTION"

Check out the complete example for combining these commands in a single script.

Use a package manager:

# macOS or Linux brew install gum # Arch Linux (btw) pacman -S gum # Nix nix-env -iA nixpkgs.gum # Flox flox install gum # Windows (via WinGet or Scoop) winget install charmbracelet.gum scoop install charm-gum

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings curl -fsSL https://repo.charm.sh/apt/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg] https://repo.charm.sh/apt/ * *" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/charm.list sudo apt update && sudo apt install gum

Fedora/RHEL/OpenSuse

echo '[charm] name=Charm baseurl=https://repo.charm.sh/yum/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://repo.charm.sh/yum/gpg.key' | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/charm.repo sudo rpm --import https://repo.charm.sh/yum/gpg.key # yum sudo yum install gum # zypper sudo zypper refresh sudo zypper install gum

FreeBSD

# packages sudo pkg install gum # ports cd /usr/ports/devel/gum && sudo make install clean

Or download it:

Packages are available in Debian, RPM, and Alpine formats
Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD

Or just install it with go:

go install github.com/charmbracelet/gum@latest

choose: Choose an option from a list of choices
confirm: Ask a user to confirm an action
file: Pick a file from a folder
filter: Filter items from a list
format: Format a string using a template
input: Prompt for some input
join: Join text vertically or horizontally
pager: Scroll through a file
spin: Display spinner while running a command
style: Apply coloring, borders, spacing to text
table: Render a table of data
write: Prompt for long-form text
log: Log messages to output

You can customize gum options and styles with --flags and $ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES. See gum <command> --help for a full view of each command's customization and configuration options.

Customize with --flags:

gum input --cursor.foreground "#FF0" \ --prompt.foreground "#0FF" \ --placeholder "What's up?" \ --prompt "* " \ --width 80 \ --value "Not much, hby?"

Customize with ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES:

export GUM_INPUT_CURSOR_FOREGROUND="#FF0" export GUM_INPUT_PROMPT_FOREGROUND="#0FF" export GUM_INPUT_PLACEHOLDER="What's up?" export GUM_INPUT_PROMPT="* " export GUM_INPUT_WIDTH=80 # --flags can override values set with environment gum input

Prompt for input with a simple command.

gum input > answer.txt gum input --password > password.txt

Prompt for some multi-line text (ctrl+d to complete text entry).

Filter a list of values with fuzzy matching:

echo Strawberry >> flavors.txt echo Banana >> flavors.txt echo Cherry >> flavors.txt gum filter < flavors.txt > selection.txt

Select multiple options with the --limit flag or --no-limit flag. Use tab or ctrl+space to select, enter to confirm.

cat flavors.txt | gum filter --limit 2 cat flavors.txt | gum filter --no-limit

Choose an option from a list of choices.

echo "Pick a card, any card..." CARD=$(gum choose --height 15 {{A,K,Q,J},{10..2}}" "{♠,♥,♣,♦}) echo "Was your card the $CARD?"

You can also select multiple items with the --limit or --no-limit flag, which determines the maximum of items that can be chosen.

cat songs.txt | gum choose --limit 5 cat foods.txt | gum choose --no-limit --header "Grocery Shopping"

Confirm whether to perform an action. Exits with code 0 (affirmative) or 1 (negative) depending on selection.

gum confirm && rm file.txt || echo "File not removed"

Prompt the user to select a file from the file tree.

$EDITOR $(gum file $HOME)

Scroll through a long document with line numbers and a fully customizable viewport.

Display a spinner while running a script or command. The spinner will automatically stop after the given command exits.

To view or pipe the command's output, use the --show-output flag.

gum spin --spinner dot --title "Buying Bubble Gum..." -- sleep 5

Available spinner types include: line, dot, minidot, jump, pulse, points, globe, moon, monkey, meter, hamburger.

Select a row from some tabular data.

gum table < flavors.csv | cut -d ',' -f 1

Pretty print any string with any layout with one command.

gum style \ --foreground 212 --border-foreground 212 --border double \ --align center --width 50 --margin "1 2" --padding "2 4" \ 'Bubble Gum (1¢)' 'So sweet and so fresh!'

Combine text vertically or horizontally. Use this command with gum style to build layouts and pretty output.

Tip: Always wrap the output of gum style in quotes to preserve newlines (\n) when using it as an argument in the join command.

I=$(gum style --padding "1 5" --border double --border-foreground 212 "I") LOVE=$(gum style --padding "1 4" --border double --border-foreground 57 "LOVE") BUBBLE=$(gum style --padding "1 8" --border double --border-foreground 255 "Bubble") GUM=$(gum style --padding "1 5" --border double --border-foreground 240 "Gum") I_LOVE=$(gum join "$I" "$LOVE") BUBBLE_GUM=$(gum join "$BUBBLE" "$GUM") gum join --align center --vertical "$I_LOVE" "$BUBBLE_GUM"

I LOVE Bubble Gum written out in four boxes with double borders around them.

format processes and formats bodies of text. gum format can parse markdown, template strings, and named emojis.

# Format some markdown gum format -- "# Gum Formats" "- Markdown" "- Code" "- Template" "- Emoji" echo "# Gum Formats\n- Markdown\n- Code\n- Template\n- Emoji" | gum format # Syntax highlight some code cat main.go | gum format -t code # Render text any way you want with templates echo '{{ Bold "Tasty" }} {{ Italic "Bubble" }} {{ Color "99" "0" " Gum " }}' \ | gum format -t template # Display your favorite emojis! echo 'I :heart: Bubble Gum :candy:' | gum format -t emoji

For more information on template helpers, see the Termenv docs. For a full list of named emojis see the GitHub API.

Running gum format for different types of formats

log logs messages to the terminal at using different levels and styling using the charmbracelet/log library.

# Log some debug information. gum log --structured --level debug "Creating file..." name file.txt # DEBUG Unable to create file. name=temp.txt # Log some error. gum log --structured --level error "Unable to create file." name file.txt # ERROR Unable to create file. name=temp.txt # Include a timestamp. gum log --time rfc822 --level error "Unable to create file."

See the Go time package for acceptable --time formats.

See charmbracelet/log for more usage.