lipbalm

Overview ¶

Package lipbalm provides a simple template engine for rich terminal rendering.

Lipbalm combines Go's text/template with lipgloss styling through XML-like tags, enabling declarative terminal output that automatically adapts to terminal capabilities.

Core Functions ¶

The package offers three main functions:

• Render: Processes Go templates then expands style tags
• ExpandTags: Only expands style tags (no template processing)
• StripTags: Removes all style tags for plain text output

Usage with Go templating ¶

styles := lipbalm.StyleMap{
	"title": lipgloss.NewStyle().Bold(true),
	"date":  lipgloss.NewStyle().Foreground(lipgloss.Color("240")),
}
template := `<title>{{.Title}}</title> <date>{{.Date}}</date>`
data := struct {
	Title string
	Date  string
}{
	Title: "Hello, World!",
	Date:  "2025-08-15",
}
output, err := lipbalm.Render(template, data, styles)
fmt.Println(output)

Usage for tag expansion only ¶

styles := lipbalm.StyleMap{ "title": lipgloss.NewStyle().Bold(true) }
input := `<title>Hello, World!</title>`
output, err := lipbalm.ExpandTags(input, styles)
fmt.Println(output)

Plain text output ¶

input := `<title>Hello</title> <date>2025</date>`
plain := lipbalm.StripTags(input)  // Returns: "Hello 2025"

Tags ¶

Tags are used to apply styles. The tag name must correspond to a key in the StyleMap passed to the Render or ExpandTags function.

<my-style>This text will be styled.</my-style>

Special Tags ¶

The <no-format> tag only renders when the terminal doesn't support color:

<status>Status</status><no-format> ✓</no-format>

In the example above, the "✓" will only be rendered in plain text mode.

Integration with dodot ¶

In dodot's output pipeline, lipbalm is the final styling layer that converts semantic tags from templates into terminal-appropriate output. It automatically:

• Detects terminal color capabilities via termenv
• Honors the NO_COLOR environment variable
• Gracefully handles invalid XML by returning the original text

See pkg/output/doc.go for the complete rendering pipeline documentation.