Introduction to CLIUI

CLIUI is a popular utility for building command-line interface (CLI) user experiences. It provides a rich set of APIs to create functional, user-friendly CLI tools. This guide covers a wide array of CLIUI APIs with code snippets and includes an application example.

Key APIs and Examples

UI

Creates a new user interface instance.

  const cliui = require('cliui');
  let ui = cliui();

div

Adds a new row to the UI.

   ui.div('Welcome to CLIUI!');
   ui.div({
     text: 'Command options:',
     padding: [1, 0, 1, 2]
   });

span

Add inline elements to the UI.

   ui.span(
     {text: 'Option 1:', width: 20},
     {text: 'Description for option 1.'}
   );

resetOutput

Resets the UI output.

   ui.resetOutput();

toString

Renders the UI to a string that can be displayed in the terminal.

   console.log(ui.toString());

Full Application Example

Below is a full example that showcases several CLIUI APIs in a mini application:

  const cliui = require('cliui');
  
  let appUI = cliui();
  
  appUI.div('CLIUI Application');
  
  appUI.div({
    text: 'Usage:',
    padding: [1, 0, 1, 2]
  });
  
  appUI.span(
    { text: '--help', width: 20 },
    { text: 'Display this help message' }
  );
  
  appUI.span(
    { text: '--version', width: 20 },
    { text: 'Display application version' }
  );
  
  appUI.div();
  
  console.log(appUI.toString());

In the example above, we created a small help utility for a CLI application using various CLIUI APIs such as div and span to build a structured and user-friendly output.

By mastering the CLIUI library, you can significantly enhance the usability of your command-line tools.

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