Skip to content
Day 69: new resources are added every day. See what's new

Desktop App

Gum

A toolkit for adding friendly prompts and menus to shell scripts.

Visit Gum4.6
  • Rating

    4.6 / 5

  • Pricing

    Free

  • Difficulty

    Intermediate

  • Works on

    macOS, Windows, Linux

Built with love by Shushant Lakhyani. Building bestproductivityresources.com

What is Gum?

Gum, from Charm, is a free, open-source command-line toolkit that adds polished building blocks to shell scripts, such as text inputs, pickers, confirmations, spinners and filters. You drop a single command into a script and get an interactive prompt, so small personal automations become easy to use without writing a full app.

Third-party open-source projects. We are not affiliated with their authors; repositories are provided as-is by their maintainers. Review each project's license, code and security before installing. See our Disclaimer.

Pros: what Gum does well

  • Interactive prompts with one command
  • Works in any shell script
  • Free and open source

Cons: where it falls short

  • Only useful if you write scripts
  • Command line only

Who Gum is for

Developers who build their own small terminal automations.

Who can skip it

People who never write shell scripts.

Gum alternatives

Not sold on Gum? These do a similar job, and each card says what it has in common.

chezmoi

Focus: dotfiles and config management. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.7 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

jq

Focus: json, data and filter. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.7 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

OCRmyPDF

Focus: ocr and scanned pdf. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.7 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

rclone

Focus: cloud sync, backup and file transfer. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.7 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreeWindows, macOS

direnv

Focus: environment variables, shell and projects. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Same 4.6 rating.

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Linux

Free alternatives to Gum

Want to spend nothing? These free picks cover similar ground.

Nushell

Focus: shell and data pipelines. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Same 4.6 rating.

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

Task

Focus: task runner, automation and build tool. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Same 4.6 rating.

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

aria2

Focus: downloads and bittorrent. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.5 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

Dasel

Focus: json, yaml and data conversion. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.5 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

pueue

Focus: task queue, background jobs and terminal. Shares command line and open source with Gum. Rated 4.5 (Gum: 4.6).

Desktop AppFreemacOS, Windows

iTerm2

Focus: terminal, mac and tmux. Shares command line and open source with Gum. A Mac app, not a desktop app. Rated 4.7 (Gum: 4.6).

Mac AppFreemacOS
Are you the maker of Gum?Get a free Featured badge for your site, a share image and ready-to-paste posts. No sign-up.

New · updated daily

What people are actually doing with AI

Real use cases shared on Reddit, Hacker News, X, GitHub and blogs, summarised in plain words with a link to every original post.

Browse AI use cases

Free Notion database

1,100+ ways people are making money online

Real online businesses, creators and projects, broken down by how they make money: apps, online stores, AI tools and more. Free on Gumroad.

Get the free database

Free Notion database

399+ ways to make money online

Hundreds of online income methods in one place, so you can compare options and pick one to try. Free on Gumroad.

Get the free list

For research and ideas only. Results vary and nothing here is a promise of income. See our Disclaimer.

Weekly newsletter

Everything new, every Monday.

One short email every Monday with everything shipped that week: new free tools and websites, new guides, new free browser tools and what's new in my free Gumroad libraries, plus how the site is growing. Free, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Join the newsletter

You sign up on Gumroad, which stores your email to send the newsletter. See our Privacy Policy.