pkg:npm/roy-tty-cli@1.0.9
A terminal based todo app, built from scratch to understand how CLI tools actually work under the hood.
I built this not because I needed another todo app but because I wanted to understand things. Things like how a CLI command gets installed globally on a machine, how npm publishing works, how you can persist data without touching a database, and how terminal UI libraries behave when you actually use them in a real project.
This is not a product. It is a learning artifact.
Everything runs inside your terminal and everything gets saved to a local JSON file on your system. No server. No cloud. No account.
Add tasks from the command line directly or through an interactive menu.
List everything with category grouping and current status so you can see what's done and what's still pending.
Toggle task state between done and pending whenever you need to.
Delete tasks cleanly from the list.
Organize by category so tasks like backend work, DSA practice, and system design stuff don't all pile into the same undifferentiated list.
Check your stats to see a simple progress breakdown of how many tasks you have finished.
Interactive mode gives you a menu-driven interface inside the terminal using Inquirer so you don't have to remember any commands.
Direct CLI mode lets you just fire commands if you know what you want.
npm install -g roy-tty-cliRun it without any arguments to open interactive mode:
roy-ttyOr use it directly from the command line:
roy-tty add "finish the auth module"
roy-tty list
roy-tty list --done
roy-tty list --pending
roy-tty list --category backend
roy-tty done 1
roy-tty delete 1All your tasks are stored in a single JSON file at:
~/.roy-tty/todos.json
Nothing leaves your machine. It's just the Node.js fs module reading and writing a file. That's the entire database layer.
index.js entry point, wires up the cli
menu.js interactive mode and the inquirer ui
commands.js all the actual command logic lives here
store.js the file based data layer
ui.js terminal rendering and table formatting
This is not production ready and it was never meant to be.
No sync. No auth. No cloud backup. No databases. No fancy error handling for edge cases that probably don't matter.
What it does do is show how all these pieces fit together:
- The
binfield in package.json - How global commands work
- How npm publishing works
- How Inquirer handles menu interactions
- How Chalk styles terminal output
- How local persistence works with the file system
If you're trying to understand how CLI tools work from first principles, the codebase is intentionally small enough to read in one sitting.
- Node.js
- Inquirer
- Chalk
- Figlet
- CLI Table 3
- fs module