Interactive CLIs

Interactive Patterns

Interactive CLIs guide users through workflows with prompts, selections, confirmations, and progress indicators. They are common in setup wizards, deployment tools, and developer utilities.

• Simple prompts — Ask for a single value (name, token, path)
• Selection menus — Choose from a list of options
• Confirmations — Yes/no decisions before destructive actions
• Multi-step wizards — Guide through complex workflows
• TUIs — Full terminal interfaces with navigation and state

promptui for Simple Prompts

promptui provides simple, single-question prompts. It is lightweight and works well for straightforward input collection.

survey for Multi-Step Forms

survey provides a collection of prompt types that can be chained into multi-step forms. It supports input, select, confirm, multi-select, and password prompts.

Bubbletea for TUIs

Bubbletea is a framework for building terminal user interfaces. It uses the Elm architecture: a model, update loop, and view function. This makes complex TUIs manageable and testable.

Spinners and Progress

Spinners and progress indicators show that work is happening. For long-running operations, they prevent users from thinking the tool has hung.

Best Practices

• Always provide a non-interactive mode for scripts and CI
• Use sensible defaults so users can press Enter to accept
• Validate input before accepting — reject bad values immediately
• Show progress for operations longer than 2 seconds
• Use color sparingly — it helps distinguish information but can be overwhelming
• Test with GOFLAGS=-mod=mod to handle new dependencies