Gemini CLI

Given that there's another comment complaining about this being in node...

This perfectly demonstrates the benefit of the nodejs platform. Trivial to install and use. Almost no dependency issues (just "> some years old version of nodejs"). Immediately works effortlessly.

I've never developed anything on node, but I have it installed because so many hugely valuable tools use it. It has always been absolutely effortless and just all benefit.

And what a shift from most Google projects that are usually a mammoth mountain of fragile dependencies.

(uv kind of brings this to python via uvx)

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.

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.