Maintaining Scripts using Just and Gum

Maintaining Scripts using Just and Gum

April 2025

I’ve found maintaining shell scripts and aliases to be a bit of a mess. I know people have their own systems with dotfiles, but it never ‘stuck’ with me. I’m trialing a new approach using gum and just, both which can be installed via brew. This makes it so there less memorisation of what different programs do, and their parameters, since you can control and name variables to a flow that you like. Combined with just’s ability to target justfile from different directories, this makes centralising scripts and cli commands very straightforward.

For example, the following are roughly equivalent:

$ just foo/a b
$ (cd foo && just a b)

To avoid the cd, the annotation [no-cd] can be used. Putting this altogether, I can for example have some “global” scripts that converts video to audio, or downloads youtube videos using the following recipe:

1[no-cd]
2convert_to_audio:
3    FILE=$(gum file)
4    ffmpeg -i $FILE -vn -acodec libvorbis -q:a 0 $FILE.ogg
5
6[no-cd]
7download_video:
8    uvx yt-dlp@latest -S "res:$(gum choose 1080 720 480 360 240 144)" $(gum input)

Edit: August 2025

Recently when trying to setup API keys and authentication for a locally running service, I ended up using gum to tackle having a ’lightweight’ approach to avoid having credentials in files. In a nutshell it would look something like:

1run_server:
2    API_KEY=$(gum input --password)
3    start-server.sh