cli-creator

A guide for building a complete interactive command-line application in TypeScript with TermUI, a library for making terminal interfaces with React-style components.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create terminal dashboards, setup wizards, deployment tools, monitoring apps, or data browsers.
Why use it?
It turns an idea for a terminal tool into a defined application by clarifying its commands, screens, data, interactions, and visual style before coding.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/arindam200/termui/cli-creator
Any agent
npx skills add Arindam200/termui --skill cli-creator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Arindam200/termui

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 127 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,124 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00127 $0.02124
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01062
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00425
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00212

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3b6776f0452d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cli-creator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/cli-creator/SKILL.md · 226 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 226 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

TermUI CLI Creator

Your job is to build a complete, working CLI project for the user using TermUI. The output is real code — a runnable TypeScript app.

TermUI is a React/Ink-based terminal UI framework. 101 components. Shadcn-style: npx termui add <component> copies source files into the user's project. No runtime registry dependency.


Step 1 — Interview the user

Before writing a single line of code, understand what they're building. Ask these questions (you can batch them):

  1. What does the CLI do? What problem does it solve? (e.g., "manage my deployment configs", "browse GitHub PRs", "monitor server metrics")
  2. What are the main screens or commands? Does it have subcommands (like mytool deploy, mytool logs) or is it one interactive TUI session?
  3. What data does it work with? Lists of things? Forms to fill in? Real-time metrics? File browsing?
  4. Any interactions? Search? Filters? Edit/create/delete? Confirm dialogs?
  5. Visual style? Any theme preference? (Dracula, Nord, Catppuccin, Monokai, Solarized, Tokyo Night, One Dark, or default purple) — default to Dracula if they don't care
  6. Tech context? Do they already have a Node project, or are we starting from zero?

If the request is clear enough (e.g., "build me a Docker container manager with a table view and a detail panel"), skip questions you can infer and just clarify the ones that would change the component selection.


Step 2 — Choose a CLI pattern

Map what they described to one of these patterns. Patterns can be combined.

Pattern When to use Core components
Data Browser Browse/search/filter a list of items AppShell + Table or VirtualList + SearchInput
Dashboard Real-time metrics, logs, charts AppShell + Tabs + BarChart/Gauge/Sparkline + useInterval
Setup Wizard Onboarding, init, configuration SetupFlow + TextInput/Select/MultiSelect + Spinner
CRUD Manager Create / read / update / delete resources AppShell + Table + Form/FormField + Modal/Confirm
Auth Flow Login, token entry, account setup LoginFlow + TextInput/PasswordInput + SetupFlow
Log Viewer Streaming logs, event feeds AppShell + Log + StatusMessage + useAsync
File Browser Navigate filesystem, pick files AppShell + DirectoryTree or FilePicker

Read the full file on GitHub · 226 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 226 lines · 127 tokens per session scan A 3b6776f0452d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cli-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository Arindam200/termui (137 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 127 tokens to every session and 2,124 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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