web4more / html-simple-dialogs

🗨️ prompt() and friends for Node.js

Node.js simple dialogs polyfill

🗨️ prompt() and friends for Node.js

Installation

You can install this package from npm, or any npm-compatible package manager like Yarn or pnpm.

npm install @jcbhmr/html-simple-dialogs

🛑 This polyfill only works with Node.js. If you're using Deno or a browser, these functions are already provided for you.

⚠️ We use node:readline/promises which was added in Node.js v17.0.0.

Usage

alert(), prompt(), and confirm() will synchronously block the main thread. This behaviour is similar to the corresponding implementation of these functions in the browser. If the current environment isn't suited to a UI prompt (e.g. you're in CI or STDIN isn't a TTY), these functions will behave flawlessly and equivalent to their browser counterparts as though popups were disabled.

These functions are especially useful when you're writing a very basic CLI app and you don't need a bunch of fancy parsing schemas to handle one or two input fields for strings. However, if you are looking for a CLI framework for a more advanced CLI app, you should check out one of the popular CLI tools for Node.js.

Example

This example will prompt you for your name, and then ask if you're a developer. If you are, it will pause and alert() you, otherwise, it will log to the console and exit immediately.

import "@jcbhmr/html-simple-dialogs";

const name = prompt("What's your name?");
if (confirm("Are you a developer?")) {
  alert(`Hello, ${name}. You're a developer.`);
} else {
  console.log(`Hello, ${name}. You're not a developer.`);
}

Development

This package is written in TypeScript and uses Vite for development. To get started, you can use GitHub Codespaces to open this repository in a browser-based VS Code instance, or you can clone the repository and run npm install to install the dependencies.

To start up the dev-loop and run the tests, you can run npm start. To run only the tests, you can run npm test. Note that the demo script is only run in non-CI environments from npm test. It's recommended to run npm test before commiting or pushing changes. It also formats your code with Prettier!

📚 For more information about how this package works and more dev-focused docs, check out the wiki!

html-simple-dialogs's Issues

Use sync readline

Basically just take a whole lotta code from the Node.js project https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v19.8.1/lib/internal/readline/interface.js#L582 and make it use sync reads, not ondata events.

That's way more work than I just made it sound.

An easier thing to do might be to simulate a tighter eventloop like:

const cbs = [];
let returnValue;

cbs.push((buffer) => {
  if (buffer[0] === "\n") {
    returnValue = buffer;
    return;
  }
});

while (!returnValue) {
  readSync(fd, buffer);
  for (const cb of cbs) {
    cb(buffer);
  }
}
return returnValue;

Use vite-plugin-dts

qmhc/vite-plugin-dts#194
microsoft/rushstack#3891
microsoft/rushstack#3890

npm install issue for `@jcbhmr/html-simple-dialogs`

Hey, I tried installing @jcbhmr/html-simple-dialogs from npm as per the docs, but it seems it's not there. Is it published yet?

Remove fork relationship

Get it to work with StackBlitz?

Improve serialization

Right now errors are literally [object Object]

maybe use v8.serialize()? https://nodejs.org/api/v8.html#serialization-api

Add TypeDoc documentation