A young startup is setting out to transform the command line interface (CLI) into something a little more appropriate for the modern age, something a little more glamorous.
Charm is a four-year-old company founded by a former Apple, Last.fm and TweetDeck engineer Toby Padillanext to Christian Rocha who previously served as head of voice at Snap acquisition Zenly. The duo formed Charm to power next-generation CLIs packed with tools to improve their visual appearance, while adding features like the ability to display text from documents and even store data like user profiles. And all with an underlying open source spirit.
Charm had previously raised around $4 million in funding spread across multiple angel and seed rounds, and now the company is adding another $6 million to its coffers with Google’s venture capital fund, Gradient Ventures, leading the charge, with support from Cavalry Ventures, Fuel Capital, Firestreak, and a host of angel sponsors.
Chain of command
The command line has long served as a powerful conduit for developers to interact with the operating system using simple text-based commands. Although the graphical user interface (GUI) has gained traction, CLIs remain popular as they offer more flexibility and speed to developers, while consuming fewer system resources than GUIs.
“Most developers will use a combination of CLI and GUI tools: the CLI gives developers the ability to compose commands and quickly create solutions to complex problems, where GUIs are limited to solving the small set of use cases for which that were specifically designed. Padilla explained to TechCrunch.
Additionally, many Internet infrastructure and development tools are essentially CLI-first, including git and SSHalthough there are often GUI clients also available for those who prefer them.
“GUIs can be good for initial discovery of functionality,” Padilla continued. “When you have a toolbar with icons, it’s easier to see what the functionality of a program is versus something like a big set of command line flags.”
So while CLIs offer power and flexibility, GUIs provide usability, and Charm strives to bring together the best of these worlds. For example, Charm has developed the Go framework. bubble tea to create terminal applications with some built-in GUI goodness as well as support for mouse control.
“We see TUIs (text-based user interfaces) powered by Bubble Tea as a good way to bring GUI discoverability to the command line,” Padilla said.
Charm: Bubble Tea Image credits: Charm
Elsewhere, Charm has created a reduction reader called Glow which allows developers to see readme files and similar documentation directly within the command line.
Charm: Radiance Image credits: Charm
But the company has developed all kinds of tools to bring more functionality to the command line, including VHS to help developers record screenshots of command-line applications for demos and README files; and Popwhich involves sending emails (full of attachments) from the command line.
For Pop, Charm partnered with another Gradient Ventures portfolio company called Resend, a developer-focused email platform. And what’s more, Resend CEO Zeno Rocha also invested in Charm.
Charm: pop Image credits: Charm
Then there is Modificationspromoted as “ai for the command line,” supporting large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI and the open source alternative LocalAI.
For example, a developer could pipe the contents of a code file into Mods and tell it to “refactor” the code and save the result to a new file.
“We found that LLM-based ai models produced really good markdowns, so we wanted to create a simple tool that worked with OpenAI and LocalAI models for use in command channels,” Padilla said.
Charm: Modifications Image credits: Charm
Show me the money
In terms of business model, Charm is working on a business plan This is currently approaching something close to a private beta, although Padilla notes that it’s already being adopted by developers at some pretty big companies, including Amazon’s AWS, Shopify, Nvidia, GitHub, and more.
“These companies are using our libraries in their own applications,” Padilla said, pointing to examples in GitHub projects from likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure where Bubble Tea is used.
Today, Charm has eight full-time employees spread across the US, Canada, Brazil and Germany, and with another $6 million in the bank, the startup is well-funded to double down on its recent adoption and add new features to ” Customize, augment, and improve the CLI experience for thousands of developers.
Charm isn’t the only company looking to power the command line: In 2019, Microsoft launched a new terminal that supports emojis, Unicode, and East Asian fonts. And then there’s the Y Combinator (YC) alum Figwhich has been developing autocomplete functionality for the command line, prompting the mighty Amazon to buy the startup outright.
So it’s clear that there are attempts from multiple angles to drag the humble CLI into the modern era.
“The command-line interface is the gateway for all builders, but the shell and shell scripts haven’t improved much since they were first introduced in the 1970s,” Padilla said. “We are going to implement the next generation of our platform on both the frontend and backend. We will also work on sustainable open source software development and ethical monetization.”
