About

BashUI is a lightweight toolkit for building styled terminal dialogs in Bash.

It includes framed boxes, user input prompts, list selections, text formatting, and customizable visual styles — everything you need to create clean, informative, or interactive command-line interfaces.

Features

• Framed one-line and multi-line boxes with 16 border styles
• User input prompts with optional timeout and default answers
• List selection menus with automatic numbering and sorting
• Customizable text styles (bold, color, background, blink...)
• Automatic text wrapping, alignment, and indentation
• Modular functions you can reuse in your own scripts
• Single-file script for ease of use
• No dependencies beyond Bash (v4+) and standard Unix tools

Installation

Clone the repository and use BashUI as a standalone CLI utility:

git clone https://github.com/jpfleury/bashui.git
path/to/bashui/bashui box "Thank you for using BashUI!"

Usage

BashUI provides three main commands:

bashui box <text> [text_style] [border_style] [newline_before] [newline_after]

bashui input <mode> [description] [question] [empty_is_valid] [indent_question] [timeout_s] [text_style] [border_style]

bashui title <text> <level> [text_style] [border_style] [newline_before] [newline_after]

Run bashui --help to see all options and detailed examples.

Compatibility

• Requires Bash 4 or higher
• Uses standard Unix tools: awk, sed, fold, tput

Examples to get started

Simple one-line box:

bashui box "Operation completed successfully"
bashui box "Operation completed successfully" success

Two-line informative box:

bashui box "Backup~~~The operation finished without errors."

Two-line box for errors:

bashui box "Database error~~~Connection timed out on db-server-01." error
bashui box "Database error~~~Connection timed out on db-server-01." error_bg

User confirmation ("No" by default):

answer=$(bashui input yN "Delete all files?")

if [[ $answer == "y" ]]; then
	echo "Proceeding with deletion..."
fi

User confirmation ("Yes" by default):

answer=$(bashui input Yn "Restart the server now?")

if [[ $answer == "y" ]]; then
	echo "Restarting..."
fi

Selection list:

selected=$(bashui input list $'Choose a database engine:\nSQLite\nPostgreSQL\nMySQL')

echo "You selected $selected"

Title display:

bashui title "Setup complete" 2 success

License

Author: Jean-Philippe Fleury https://github.com/jpfleury
Copyright © Jean-Philippe Fleury, 2021-2025

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.