Gum — A Tool for Glamorous Shell Scripts by Charm

What it is

Gum is a command-line toolkit by Charm for building interactive shell scripts. It provides standalone commands for spinners, confirmation prompts, text inputs, file pickers, tables, and styled output. Each command is a single binary call you pipe into or compose with standard shell constructs.

Gum is for shell script authors who want to add interactivity without switching to a full TUI framework. If you write bash scripts for developer tooling, onboarding flows, or CI prompts, Gum makes them polished and user-friendly with minimal code.

How it saves time or tokens

This workflow provides the installation command and ready-to-use Gum recipes. Instead of building interactive prompts from scratch with read and select, you get single-line commands that handle input validation, styling, and user experience. The interactive commit message recipe alone replaces a multi-line bash function.

How to use

1. Install Gum:

brew install gum

1. Use Gum commands in your shell scripts:

# Interactive selection
TYPE=$(gum choose feat fix docs style refactor test chore)

# Text input with placeholder
SCOPE=$(gum input --placeholder 'scope')

# Multi-line text area
DESC=$(gum write --placeholder 'Describe your changes...')

# Confirmation
gum confirm 'Deploy to production?' && deploy

1. Combine commands for complex flows:

# Interactive git commit
git commit -m "$TYPE($SCOPE): $DESC"

Example

#!/bin/bash
# Interactive project setup script using Gum

NAME=$(gum input --placeholder 'Project name')
LANG=$(gum choose 'TypeScript' 'Python' 'Go' 'Rust')
FEATURES=$(gum choose --no-limit 'CI/CD' 'Docker' 'Linting' 'Testing')

gum confirm "Create $LANG project '$NAME'?" || exit 0

gum spin --title "Setting up $NAME..." -- sleep 2

echo "Project $NAME created with: $FEATURES" | gum format

# File picker for log analysis
LOG=$(gum file /var/log/)
gum pager < "$LOG"

Related on TokRepo

• Automation tools -- Shell scripting and automation workflows
• AI coding tools -- Developer productivity tools

Common pitfalls

• Gum requires a terminal that supports ANSI escape codes. Piping Gum output through non-TTY contexts (like cron jobs or CI without pseudo-TTY) disables interactivity.
• The gum choose --no-limit flag allows multiple selections but returns them on separate lines. Use while read or array assignment to capture multiple values.
• Gum's styled output depends on terminal color support. In minimal containers or SSH sessions without TERM set, styling may not render.