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Comment by ekunazanu | Hacker News Reader

I have nothing against npm, but having a single binary would've been a lot more trivial and convenient. Codex is heading in that direction, and I hope others do too.

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I don't see how it can get more trivial and convenient than

    npm install -g @google/gemini-cli

then having a gemini command line app. I mean, I guess if you don't have node installed, but it's so prevalent in so many tools it's a reasonable thing to require.

Piping a downloaded shell script to bash seems pretty much the same effort.

It's more like I want my OS package manager to be handling global packages (personal preference), and there is a higher chance of it being included in official OS repositories if it is packaged as a precompiled binary with minimal dependencies.

I find this frustrating because when switching between different Node versions for various projects, gemini-cli might not be compatible with all of them. That means even if I’ve installed it globally, it won’t work in some directories, as .nvm changes the node version. then I have to install different copies of gemini-cli for each version of node I work in.

It would be much better if I didn’t have to reinstall it every time I change Node versions.

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