Gum

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).

Tutorial

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.

Installation

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

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

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

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

Commands

• 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

Customization

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

Input

Prompt for input with a simple command.

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

Write

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

gum write > story.txt

Filter

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

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

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"

File

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

EDITOR $(gum file $HOME)

Pager

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

gum pager < README.md

Spin

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.

Table

Select a row from some tabular data.

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

Style

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!'

Join

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"

Format

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.

Log

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.

Examples

How to use gum in your daily workflows:

See the examples directory for more real world use cases.

• Write a commit message:

git commit -m "$(gum input --width 50 --placeholder "Summary of changes")" \
           -m "$(gum write --width 80 --placeholder "Details of changes")"

• Open files in your $EDITOR

$EDITOR $(gum filter)

• Connect to a tmux session

SESSION=$(tmux list-sessions -F \#S | gum filter --placeholder "Pick session...")
tmux switch-client -t $SESSION || tmux attach -t $SESSION

• Pick a commit hash from git history

git log --oneline | gum filter | cut -d' ' -f1 # | copy

• Simple skate password selector.

skate list -k | gum filter | xargs skate get

• Uninstall packages

brew list | gum choose --no-limit | xargs brew uninstall

• Clean up git branches

git branch | cut -c 3- | gum choose --no-limit | xargs git branch -D

• Checkout GitHub pull requests with gh

gh pr list | cut -f1,2 | gum choose | cut -f1 | xargs gh pr checkout

• Copy command from shell history

gum filter < $HISTFILE --height 20

• sudo replacement

alias please="gum input --password | sudo -nS"

Feedback

Wed love to hear your thoughts on this project. Feel free to drop us a note!

• Twitter
• The Fediverse
• Discord

License

MIT

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Part of Charm.

Charm Charm loves open source