Gum — A Tool for Glamorous Shell Scripts by Charm

Introduction

Gum is part of the Charm toolkit (bubbletea, lipgloss). It exposes every TUI building block as a standalone subcommand you can call from bash, making your install scripts, setup wizards, and dev-ops runbooks actually pleasant to use. It's the missing UI layer between bash and full Go TUI apps.

What Gum Does

• gum input — prompt with placeholders, masks, validation.
• gum choose — single/multi-select from a list.
• gum confirm — yes/no dialog with keyboard controls.
• gum file — file picker TUI.
• gum spin — spinner around any subprocess.
• gum style / gum format — paint text with lipgloss.
• gum table — render CSVs as styled tables.
• gum log — leveled structured log output.

Architecture Overview

Each subcommand is a thin CLI over a bubbletea program. The output goes to stdout (as the selected value) while the TUI draws on stderr, so composing with $(gum ...) in bash just works. --theme / lipgloss flags customize colors without any global config.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Install via brew, apt, dnf, pacman, scoop, winget.
• Themes via flags: --height, --cursor, --prompt, --cursor.foreground.
• GUM_* env vars mirror flags.
• Works in CI when --no-color or CI=true.
• Pair with charm freeze to render docs.

Key Features

• Composes with bash — drop into existing scripts.
• Every TUI primitive (input, choose, file, spin, table).
• Beautiful defaults; deeply themeable.
• Small static Go binary; cross-platform.
• CI-friendly degradation.

Comparison with Similar Tools

• fzf — unmatched for fuzzy-select; gum's choose is simpler + themed.
• dialog/whiptail — retro, curses-based; gum is modern.
• bubbletea (Go lib) — for full apps; gum is for scripts.
• inquirer.js — Node-only.
• enquirer — Node-only.

FAQ

Q: Read password without echo? A: gum input --password.

Q: Multi-select? A: gum choose --no-limit.

Q: Works over SSH? A: Yes, as long as the TTY is present.

Q: Reusable themes? A: Export GUM_INPUT_CURSOR_FOREGROUND=212 etc. in a sourcing script.

Sources

• https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum
• https://charm.sh