If you like terminals it’s your sign that Go may soon, if not already, become a “Go”-to language to build jaw dropping command line tools

Some of you may know a project called Charm. It started four years ago with the hands of Toby Padilla, who worked, among others at Last.fm and Christian Rocha working for example for Zenly.
Charm once in a while pops up here and there, and it’s quite interesting project.
But how is it possible that command line tool raises 6 million dollar? Isn’t Bash enought?
One of the absolutely fantastic examples of capabilities of command line for me is Lynx.
It is a command line browser. Yes. You read it correctly. You can browse the Internet with your terminal.
To my amusement it works great with modern websites. Just look how my website looks like:
As you can see there’s menu, text. You can navigate between pages of my website and read the content.
Of course it doesn’t support images as a good text based web browser. But there are also command line browsers that handle images and even videos.
Lynx is an example that terminals are as powerful as movies show.
Unfortunately visual GUIs and UIs, taps and doomscrools took over the world.
But there’s growing trend of using terminal for various tasks. People have their favorite shells, themes and colors.
I also like write command line tools. For example to build complex projects locally or automate Git operations.
Compared to GUIs usually you can combine a lot of actions into one command and seep water when the computer does stuff.
That’s the reason I’ve built a fantasy themed GIT command deck (you can actually buy) or released Shortcut GIT CLI that let’s you switch between Shortcut ticket branches seamlessly in the command line.
The Nether also froze with Windows 11 introducing multitab terminal not to mention the fantastic Powershell.
In such environment Charm is a project that tries to rethink command line and adjust it to the needs of people who like command line and see it could do more.
If you think about it, you may wonder what Charm really is. Is it a new terminal? In fact not really.
Think about Charm as a company that builds command line libraries and apps.
So what Charm has to offer so it raised 6 million dollar in this round? Let’s see the most interesting projects!

Log

Log, as other Charm tools is written in Golang. The authors asked the question if they can improve how we handle and show logs. They made logs look like Jennifer Aniston:
Please notice it’s colorful, and well organized, easy to approach and most importantly - lovely.

Bubbles

Bubbles is for command line, what Material UI is for the web design. Kindof. It’s a component library for terminal you can easily use. The library is written in Go, and offers really fantastic components. way beyond what you’d expect.
You need a text area? Here you go:
Or maybe a progress bar?
There’s twelve components with some additional ones. It’s all open source like other Charm projects and it’s extremely easy to add these to your command line tools.
There are also other toolkit libraries to build command line and even SSH server tools. But there are also apps.

Top of the Pops

There are also AI tools if you’re into it. But I’ll write about Top of the Pops.
It gives you a nice, command line interface (TUI) to send emails. You can even attach files!
It also offers a nice API to send emails with regular commands.
As you can see Charm really is about rethinking how we use command line.
I personally love the user experience focus. Very few engineers have the capability to think about that. Charm elegantly combines innovative terminal features with top notch design trends.
So it’s perfectly clear why investors throw all their vdollars at Charm.
With the new 6 million dollar investment from gradient, we’ll see more stuff and tbh I can’t wait for it!
The investment was made by Gradient Ventures held by Google. Since Golang was designed at Google it is a perfect fit.
Also an interesting event, because web company invested into a command line tool.
I can’t recall any manufacturers of other OS to do something similar. But I don’t know too much about that matter.
Anyways, very good, very good Google!
The investment is made especially for introducing more AI tools into the command line.
So if you think about it, Charm combines several trends at once. Terminals, modern design trends like gradients and glamour and AI.
As a designer of fantasy flashcard games for programmers I really like their thinking ☺
The growth of Charm will also influence Golang popularity. We kindof don’t have a modern language dedicated to write terminal apps. Golang may be the perfect fit for that niche.
Will all the future terminal apps written in Go? What do you think? Write a comment!

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