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.
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.
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.
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.
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)