Terminal GUI Prompts

Terminal prompts that promote to native GUI dialogs when a TTY has a desktop; always echo prompt text for pipes/AI.
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About The Project

Enhanced terminal UI that promotes confirmations and text prompts to native Windows dialogs when the process has a TTY and GUI. The prompt text is always written to stdout so that piped output (e.g. to an AI or log) still shows the question—only the input is promoted to a modal when possible.

Part of OpenShellOrg.

CLI tools often ask for y/n or a line of text. In an interactive Windows terminal with a GUI, users can instead get a native dialog with a default (e.g. "Yes") so that pressing Enter confirms without typing.

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Installation

pnpm add terminal-gui-prompts

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Usage

Confirm (Yes/No)

import { confirm, confirmBoolean } from "terminal-gui-prompts";

const answer = await confirm({
  message: "Delete all files in this folder?",
  title: "Confirm delete",
  default: "yes",
});
if (answer === "y") doDelete();

const ok = await confirmBoolean({ message: "Continue?" });

Text prompt

import { prompt } from "terminal-gui-prompts";

const name = await prompt({
  message: "Enter your name",
  title: "User",
  default: "Guest",
});

Behaviour

• Always: the message is written to stdout (so pipes and logs see the question).

• On Windows, with a TTY and no forceTerminal: a native dialog is shown.

• Otherwise: a normal terminal prompt is used.

Use forceTerminal: true to always use the terminal, e.g. in scripts.

CLI framework adapters

Adapters for @inquirer/prompts and Enquirer are available. See examples and published docs: https://openshellorg.github.io/docs/terminal-gui-prompts/

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API

• confirm(options) → Promise<"y" | "n">

• confirmBoolean(options) → Promise<boolean>

• prompt(options) → Promise<string>

• canUseWindowsGui() → boolean

See CHANGELOG.adoc.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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Contact

Open Shell Org — openshell@devcentr.org

• Project: https://github.com/openshellorg/terminal-gui-prompts

• Site: https://openshellorg.github.io

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