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Mingling

Mìng Lìng - 命令

/mɪŋ lɪŋ/

Macro magician in your CLI.

What is Mingling?

Mingling is a state-driven and data-driven CLI workflow orchestration framework built in Rust.

💡 Its name comes from the Chinese pinyin "Mìng Lìng", which means "command".

WARNING

Mingling is currently usable at a basic level, but it is still under active development, so many APIs are not yet mature. Any changes to the public API will be documented in detail in the Changelog.

Additionally, the project is currently developed by me alone (Weicao-CatilGrass). If you are interested in this project, I warmly welcome your contributions. You can reach me directly via Github Issue.

About Mingling's Design

Mingling abstracts the behavior of a program's lifecycle into three phases: Dispatch, Execution, and Rendering. Each phase is connected by types — the output of the current phase becomes the input of the next phase. For example:

dispatcher!("current", CMDCurrent => EntryCurrent);
pack!(StateNext = ());

#[chain]
fn handle_current(_: EntryCurrent) -> StateNext {
    // 1. The first phase outputs the StateNext value
    StateNext::default()  //          ^^^^^^^^^
}                 //                  |
                  //                  |
                  // 2. The second phase takes StateNext as input
#[chain]          //    |
fn handle_state_next(_: StateNext) {
    todo!()
}

See? handle_current and handle_state_next have no direct connection!

They are bridged by StateNext and automatically linked by the framework.

You can use this approach to separate computation from result rendering, like this:

// Features: ["picker"]
use mingling::macros::buffer;
use mingling::prelude::*;

dispatcher!("calc", CMDCalculate => EntryCalculate);
pack!(StateSumNumbers = Vec<i32>);
pack!(ResultNumber = i32);

// Entry: parse arguments and pass state to the calculation step
#[chain]
fn handle_calc(args: EntryCalculate) -> StateSumNumbers {
    let numbers = args.pick(&arg![Vec<i32>]).unwrap();
    StateSumNumbers::new(numbers)
}

// Calculate: pass the result to the rendering step
#[chain]
fn handle_state_sum_numbers(sum: StateSumNumbers) -> ResultNumber {
    let numbers = sum.inner;
    let total: i32 = numbers.iter().sum();
    ResultNumber::new(total)
}

// Renderer: return the render result and let the framework handle output
#[renderer(buffer)]
fn render_number(number: ResultNumber) {
    r_println!("Number: {}", *number);
}

Although this may make your program slightly more verbose, each step is a pure function, making it extremely easy to test!

Getting Started

Add Mingling to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies.mingling]
version = "0.3.0"
features = []

Or use the github version

[dependencies.mingling]
git = "https://github.com/mingling-rs/mingling.git"
tag = "unreleased"
features = []

[!NOTE] To learn more, check out Writing with Mingling

Roadmap

  • [x] Milestone.1 "MVP" 🎉
    • [x] [0.1.4] [core] [structural_renderer] Mingling can render data into serializable formats via --json and --yaml flags
    • [x] [0.1.5] [core] [comp] Mingling can dynamically invoke itself to provide completions for shells like bash, zsh, fish, and pwsh
    • [x] [0.1.6] [core] [comp] Mingling can gather more context for smarter completions
    • [x] [0.1.7] [clap] Provides a Clap compatibility layer, allowing Mingling to reuse its powerful parsing capabilities
    • [x] [0.1.7] [core] Mingling can intercept -h or --help flags to display custom help text for each subcommand
    • [x] [0.1.7] [mling] Provides a basic scaffolding tool (mling) for rapid development and debugging
    • [x] [0.1.8] [core] [dispatch_tree] Converts the subcommand list into a prefix tree to improve command matching speed
    • [x] [0.1.9] [core] [dev_toolkits] Provides debugging interfaces for developers to capture invocation information when issues arise (InvokeStackDisplay) (indirectly implemented via ProgramHook)
    • [x] [0.1.9] [core] [repl] Provides REPL capability (program.exec_repl();)
    • [x] [0.2.0] Complete documentation, tests, and examples
  • [ ] Milestone.2 "More Comfortable Dev and User Experience"
    • [ ] [mling / mingling-cli]
      • [ ] Mingling Linter
      • [ ] Mingling Project Generator
      • [ ] Mingling Program Installer & Manager (For development)
      • [ ] Helpdoc Editor
    • [ ] [picker] A more efficient and intelligent argument parser
    • [x] [macros] ~~Remove r_print! / r_println! macros~~ (see below)
    • [x] [macros] Make implicit modifications to functions explicit
  • [ ] Milestone.3 "Unplanned"
    • [ ] ...

Unplanned Features

While Mingling has several common CLI features that are NOT PLANNED to be directly included in the framework. This is because the Rust ecosystem already has excellent and mature crates to handle these issues, and Mingling's design is intended to be used in combination with them.

  • Colored Output: To add color and styles (bold, italic, etc.) to terminal output, consider using crates like colored or owo-colors. You can integrate their types directly into your renderers.
  • I18n: To translate your CLI application, the rust-i18n crate provides a powerful internationalization solution that you can use in your command logic and renderers.
  • Progress Bars: To display progress indicators, the indicatif crate is the standard choice.
  • TUI: To build full-screen interactive terminal applications, it is recommended to use a framework like ratatui (formerly tui-rs).

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

See LICENSE-MIT or LICENSE-APACHE file for details.

Learn More

To learn more, check out the following links:

generated by cgit (git 2.34.1) at 2026-07-22 13:56:17 +0000