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Vorpal: a framework for interactive CLIs in Node.js (github.com/dthree)
81 points by _7sdg on Oct 9, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



This is cool but I still scratch myself as to what I'd want to use this for.

Most often, I need UI, because I need to be monitoring flowing information + take action when/where need be.

In that sense, what would be more useful is a framework giving an interface like the old Norton Commander or Htop. Is there any thing like that in node?


The main use I intended for this is to make it ridiculously easy to make useful developer tools - CLIs come really natural to devs, and so I tried to make something a ton of people could build off of to make a ton of cool tools.

An example of a project I want to get to using it is a database CLI app - it can save your credentials, lets you connect to and query the db, give auto-completed suggestions, etc. This is now really easy to do in Javascript, and you just couldn't do that before very easily.

On your question, yeah - there is something Norton Commander-ish - it's a library called blessed, by Christopher Jeffrey, who's pretty boss at CLI apps:

https://github.com/chjj/blessed


Blessed is awesome--I'll plug the ClojureScript UI framework I'm building on top of it: https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n

And by the way great work with vorpal, I'm kind of rolling my own CLI command trickery in an app/platform I'm building on top of i9n (kind of a platform to integrate dev tools like a database app, a pluggable IDE of sorts), but I'll probably put Vorpal into i9n soon and use its many features from there.


Thanks! Your project looks pretty cool!


I'd love to see that sql cli app of yours. Is that available for public?


Ah haha - it's an idea. I have two other Vorpal apps I'm making right now, and then after they're done that would be the next one I would make.


Will check it out. Thanks!


I mostly use it with Vantage for debugging. If you haven't seen Vantage, check it out!

https://github.com/dthree/vantage/




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