Welcome to kipferl

kipferl is a CLI toolkit for building beautiful command-line applications with Python syntax, powered by PocketPy.

Write in familiar Python, ship as target-specific standalone executables as small as 1.4 MB that start in under 10 ms on the measured Apple Silicon baseline.

Why kipferl?

• Instant startup - Under 10ms cold start, no interpreter warm-up
• Standalone binaries - No Python, libc, or dynamic runtime installation on the target machine
• Python syntax - No new language to learn
• Beautiful output - Tables, boxes, progress bars, colors built-in
• Interactive prompts - Select, multiselect, confirm with keyboard navigation
• 50+ runtime modules - JSON, HTTP, SQLite, regex, and more hosted by Rust

Quick Example

import tui
import input

# Beautiful boxes
tui.box("Welcome to my app!", title="Hello", border_color="cyan")

# Interactive prompts
choice = input.select("Pick an option:", ["Deploy", "Test", "Exit"])

# Formatted tables
tui.table([
    ["Status", "Count"],
    ["Passed", "42"],
    ["Failed", "0"],
], headers=True)

tui.success(f"Selected: {choice}")

What's Different?

kipferl is not a drop-in replacement for CPython. It's a focused runtime optimized for CLI applications:

Next Steps