bash_tui_primitives.sh

bash_tui_primitives.sh is a set of simple TUI primitives in form of a single bash script.

It aims to solve a common problem: whenever I want to add more advanced printing or user prompts to a Bash script, I end up rewriting them from scratch. Not anymore...

What can it do

Draw:

• boxes
• progress bars
• spinners
• separators

User prompts:

• colored text
• "y/n" dialogs
• multiple choice prompts

Self-contained

All the functions are self-contained and complete. This means you can copy any of the functions to your codebase, and it should work without any dependencies. You can copy functions individually or even load entire set dynamically as shown in following example.

wget -q -O /tmp/bash_tui_primitives.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dancesWithMachines/bash_tui_primitives/refs/heads/main/bash_tui_primitives.sh
source /tmp/bash_tui_primitives.sh
tui_box "Hello World!"

Here's a bit more robust example. It fetches the script by tag to ensure it always stays the same and performs checksum verification.

wget -q -O /tmp/bash_tui_primitives.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dancesWithMachines/bash_tui_primitives/refs/tags/v0.0.1/bash_tui_primitives.sh
if [ "$(md5sum /tmp/bash_tui_primitives.sh | awk '{print $1}')" != "24ff49d8bc17a18ec30ad41558de0f19" ]; then
    exit 1
else
    source /tmp/bash_tui_primitives.sh
    tui_box "Hello World!"
fi

Test

Run test.sh script for a simple demo.

License

The code is in public domain, you can use the code freely without any attribution. Refer to LICENSE file for details.