`richcli`: user-friendly terminal interfaces

User-friendly Terminal User Interfaces (TUI) for venerable but intimidating unix tools (ffmpeg, pdftk), built with the rich python library for modern terminal interfaces. Interactively stitches together a command (say, ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -ss 00:00:10 -to 00:01:00) that you can then run, or use as a learning tool.

Remembering the flags and positional arguments for pdftk or ffmpeg commands is challenging and error-prone but they can also basically do most things you might want, so I built this CLI (ably assistant by claude) to make it easier to perform common operations. It also includes a generic CLI builder that can be used to build up any command line call interactively; this functionality is demoed below with pandoc.

Features

PDF Tools: Terminal UI for pdftk and ghostscript operations

Extract pages
Merge PDFs
Compress PDFs
Rotate pages
Add page numbers
Split PDFs

Example of slicing a pdf (potentially to upload into a RAG / LLM's context)

Media Conversion/slicing tools for FFmpeg operations

Convert between media formats
Resize videos
Trim media files
Adjust audio settings

Example of slicing an mp3 with timestamps

Arbirary CLI applications: build up a command line call interactively for any CLI

run richcli magnet <command>
add positional or keyword arguments
add flags
run the command

Example of building up a pandoc command to convert a markdown file to html

Installation

From Source

git clone https://github.com/apoorvalal/richcli.git
cd richcli
pip install -e .

Dependencies

Python 3.7+
Rich library (installed automatically by pip)
External tools:
- PDF Tools requires:
  - pdftk
  - ghostscript
- FFmpeg UI requires:
  - ffmpeg

Usage

Launch specific tools directly:

richcli pdf     # Launch PDF Tools
richcli ffmpeg  # Launch FFmpeg UI
richcli magnet <command>  # Launch arbitrary CLI builder

Launch the main UI:

richcli

apoorvalal/richcli

richcli: user-friendly terminal interfaces