Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By : Marian Montagnino
Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By: Marian Montagnino

Overview of this book

Although graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are intuitive and user-friendly, nothing beats a command-line interface (CLI) when it comes to productivity. Many organizations settle for a GUI without searching for alternatives that offer better accessibility and functionality. If this describes your organization, then pick up this book and get them to rethink that decision. Building Modern CLI Applications in Go will help you achieve an interface that rivals a GUI in elegance yet surpasses it in high-performance execution. Through its practical, step-by-step approach, you’ll learn everything you need to harness the power and simplicity of the Go language to build CLI applications that revolutionize the way you work. After a primer on CLI standards and Go, you’ll be launched into tool design and proper framework use for true development proficiency. The book then moves on to all things CLI, helping you master everything from arguments and flags to errors and API calls. Later, you’ll dive into the nuances of empathic development so that you can ensure the best UX possible, before you finish up with build tags, cross-compilation, and container-based distribution. By the end of this UX book, you’ll be fully equipped to take the performance and flexibility of your organization’s applications to the next level.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with a Solid Foundation
6
Part 2: The Ins and Outs of a CLI
10
Part 3: Interactivity and Empathic Driven Design
14
Part 4: Building and Distributing for Different Platforms

Implementing a terminal dashboard

When creating a terminal dashboard, you can create it as a separate standalone application or as a command that is called from the command-line application. In our specific example for the player terminal dashboard, we are going to call the dashboard when the ./bin/audiofile player command is called.

First, from the audio file’s root repository, we’ll need to use cobra-cli to create the command:

cobra-cli add player
Player created at /Users/mmontagnino/Code/src/github.com/marianina8/audiofile

Now, we can create the code to generate the terminal dashboard, called within the Run field of the player command. Remember that the terminal dashboard consists of four main layers: the terminal, infrastructure, container, and widgets. Like a painting, we’ll start with the base layer: the terminal.

Creating the terminal layer

The first thing you need to do is to create a terminal that provides access to any input and output...