Charm has raised $6M in funding

The first thing they should work on is their landing page.

Because for sure I'm their target market but I've got no idea what it does.

I spent 10 seconds trying to figure it out then I was gone.

VC funding is where cool products/ideas go to die... or sell off to be assimilated.

I don't think VC funding exists if "premium support/enterprise consulting" is the monetization strategy. Either they see monetary value in the product itself and intend to maximize it (aka subscriptions, paid features, etc), or see the IP value and intend to have the business "flipped" for profit.

These libraries seem really cool, and I can clearly see why that have such popularity.

It's a little less clear to me how you monetize this type of stack. Given such an impressive fundraise, in a tough climate, I wonder what the market opportunity the VC's have backed is.

BTW: At the time of writing, the link to Charm Cloud in your blog post is broken.

Isn't Charm just a collection of libraries for building CLI tools? Why does this need VC funding? Why does everything need to be monetized?

If you ever needed evidence that VC funding is driven by relationships and not the value of a product, read this page.

Am I too cynical?

I got to the "Why Open Source?" part, and my brain filled in: "Because bait-and-switch needs some bait."

Please prove me wrong.

Used Charm for a Shell AI cli assistant (https://github.com/ibigio/shell-ai) - bubble tea and lip gloss. It was so pleasant to use (an absolute charm), super easy syntax highlighting and streaming updates. Absolutely love their work.

Love the naming scheme, and I'm pumped that developer tooling is still able to raise this much. Without digging too deep here it's not super clear: Are these tools more for end user developers or are people using these for projects, and if so, what projects currently use these libraries?

Trying to figure out where's a good place to start trying them out...

Sounds like an interesting project, not sure VC funding is a good idea.

The "gum" stuff that walks you through setting inputs for a command line tool feels like it might be leveraged by connecting it to one of those argument parser generators that do all the hard work of pasing args for your quick shell script. One gives you a human way to enter the required info, one generates the standard command line interface for scripting. Getting both from one input (as far as possible) would be nice.

And with that the usual enshittification brought about by VC funding and incentives will begin. In 2-3 years it'll be unusable. Congrats to the founders though, have a nice exit down the road.

Would be cool if these terminals apps could be converted to a web app. Would love to make a multiplayer terminal game but make if accessible with the web.

You're missing a slash in the link to wish: "https://github.com/charmbraceletwish" -> "https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish"

nice to see effort to shake a little the terminal space, and that you can receive 6MM dollars to play with it, but, having tried things like nushell i came back to zsh after i realized that is too much of an investment for something that can disappear in 5 minutes, get poisoned by VC money or be out shined by the next bright thing, and you are competing with 100s of little binaries and ways to do things that have been around for decades here. also i find those star graph so cringe, who cares?, is someone going to decide to use this based on that?, i mean that trend can be cause of a marketing move, that is.it says nothing about the project it self.

I like what Charm is doing and their design is on point. I wonder what they're planning to do with this money. Their projects so far consist of fairly small Go CLIs and libraries.

I'm a big fan of Glow, use it all the time for rendering Markdown files in my terminals.

Been looking for the right time/project to use Bubble Tea/Lip Gloss because they seem really cool too.

Let's hope this fundraising doesn't drive them to the "enshitification" we tend to see these days, I'd love to see what else they can make if they remain true OSS.

I wonder if the Easter egg of the VHS hyperlink to "Vancouver Hack Space" is intentional or not, I assume not but still gave me a chuckle.

I remember donating to Xiki project, which looked promising and author was very passionate about it. Too bad it didn't have much traction.

Nice looking product! Haven't heard of this before. Can anyone explain me the benefits of Charm? Why should I switch from zsh?

Excellent page imo - also insane how instantly hard hitting those OS projects are!

I’ve must have missed something, What’s wrong with the current state of the terminal?

why?

I don't understand software projects called after random things. What does lip gloss do? What does glow and glamour do?

Spinnaker does the same thing and it's just not easy to follow. Same questions for echo, rosco, deck and whatever other service they have.

Why not call it charm-tui, charm-md, and spinnaker-ui, spinnaker-events, spinnaker-bakery. It would make understanding the software so much easier.