Show HN: Protostar – A CLI Prototyping Tool

github.com

5 points by dgtlntv a day ago

I am a UX designer who has been asked to help design a CLI. Looking for tools to quickly prototype a CLI that could also be easily shared with colleagues or used for user testing, I couldn't find anything. The only option I could think of was to code something from scratch using one of the existing CLI libraries.

To make designing, prototyping and user testing CLIs easier for me in the future, and hopefully to help other designers who are not as comfortable with coding, I have developed this CLI prototyping tool.

I would be very interested to hear if this tool would be useful to other people here and if there is anything I could improve about it! :)

pmdfgy 21 hours ago

You did a really great job describing the project and documenting it in the README. Congrats. The project looks super clean and professional.

That being said, TBH I don't see any real scenario where I would "prototype a CLI". Unlike a GUI where elements can be placed in some places vs others, a CLI is a CLI.

For any developer, it would probably take less time to write it directly using one of the libraries listed here : https://bloomberg.github.io/stricli/blog/intro (TS/JS) or https://github.com/spf13/cobra (Go) with stub implementations for commands.

The main problem for me is that defining the CLI in a JSON file lacks all the flexibility of code (reusability, etc.).

  • dgtlntv 12 hours ago

    That makes sense! Thank you for the feedback! :)