dialoguer

dialoguer provides a set of ready-made interactive command-line prompts for Rust CLI tools: text input, password entry, confirmation, single/multi-select menus, fuzzy select, sorting, and full-screen text editor invocation. It is part of the console-rs family of crates, built directly on top of console for terminal styling and cursor control.

Rather than requiring developers to hand-roll raw terminal input handling, dialoguer exposes a builder-style API per prompt type (Input::new(), Select::new(), Confirm::new()) with theming support (plain or colorful), input validation hooks, history support, and command-line completion, making it the standard choice for adding interactive prompts to Rust CLI applications.

What You Get

• Prompt builders for Input, Password, Confirm, Select, MultiSelect, Sort, and FuzzySelect
• Pluggable Theme trait with built-in SimpleTheme and ColorfulTheme implementations
• Input validation hooks that re-prompt on invalid input without extra boilerplate
• History support for input prompts, useful for CLIs that want shell-like recall
• Shell-word aware completion support for input prompts
• External editor integration (Editor) for multi-line text entry via $EDITOR

Common Use Cases

• Interactive setup wizards for CLI tools (project scaffolding, config generation)
• Confirmation prompts before destructive CLI operations (delete, overwrite, force-push)
• Menu-driven CLI UIs where the user picks from a list of options or toggles multiple choices
• Collecting masked password/secret input from a terminal session

Under The Hood

Architecture — The crate is organized around a prompts/ module (src/prompts/) containing one file per prompt type (input.rs, select.rs, multi_select.rs, confirm.rs, password.rs, sort.rs, fuzzy_select.rs), each exposing a builder struct with a fluent .with_prompt()/.default()/.interact() chain. Rendering is centralized in src/theme/render.rs, which every prompt type calls into so that terminal-drawing logic (cursor movement, redraw-on-keypress) lives in one place rather than being duplicated per prompt. src/paging.rs handles scrolling for select menus that exceed the terminal height, and src/completion.rs/src/history.rs are opt-in behaviors layered onto the Input prompt.

Tech Stack — Built directly on console (also a console-rs crate) for cross-platform terminal styling, cursor control, and raw-mode input handling, keeping the dependency footprint small. Optional features gate extras: editor pulls in tempfile for external-editor round-tripping, password pulls in zeroize to scrub secret input from memory, and fuzzy-select pulls in fuzzy-matcher. This feature-gating keeps the default build lean for consumers who only need basic prompts.

Code Quality — Unit tests are colocated with the prompt implementations most prone to edge-case bugs — select.rs (10 tests), multi_select.rs, fuzzy_select.rs, confirm.rs, input.rs, password.rs, and sort.rs — covering keyboard-navigation and selection-state logic. The crate also ships a deny.toml for dependency license/advisory auditing in CI, and every prompt type has a matching runnable example under examples/, which doubles as documentation and a smoke test for the public API.

API Design — The builder pattern (Input::new().with_prompt("Name").interact()) is consistent across every prompt type, so learning one prompt largely transfers to the rest. Theming is a separate concern injected via .theme(&ColorfulTheme::default()), keeping visual customization decoupled from prompt logic. The API favors terse call sites for simple use, single method chains, over configuration structs, which keeps most real-world usage to a few lines per prompt.