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The Best CLI Tools for Creative Projects

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The Best CLI Tools for Creative Projects

Some of the most powerful creative tools don't have a shiny interface. No drag-and-drop, no toolbar, no right-click menu. Just a cursor blinking at you, waiting for a command. If you've spent any time with tools like FFmpeg or ImageMagick, you know the feeling: there's something satisfying about typing exactly what you want and watching it happen. It's fast, repeatable, and — once you get the hang of it — surprisingly expressive.

Here are some of the best CLI tools for creative work, whether you're making music, manipulating images, generating text art, or writing.

1. Auwen — Live Music Performance and Sound Design

Auwen by Soniare is a microtonal sample-based music program where the entire interface is a command line. You load samples, generate synthesized sounds, apply effects, loop, perform live, and even master your tracks — all by typing short commands. It's designed for improvisation: commands are brief, real-time, and built to keep your hands moving and your attention on the music.

Here's what a simple session might look like:

src chooseFolder
sample drums
fGen sinewave
mel p
a move 9

That sequence chooses your sample source folder, then loads a drum sample, generates a sine-wave tone, applies a melodic preset, and sends both to the speakers — ready to perform. Auwen handles pitch and tempo matching automatically, and lets you queue sounds in headphones before they go out to the audience, just like a DJ cueing tracks. The modify, roll, volumeEnvelope, and gate commands let you reshape any sound without touching a mouse. There's even a master command that analyzes an audio file, applies loudness processing, and exports it — no separate mastering software needed.

If you've ever wanted to perform music the way a developer deploys code, Auwen is worth a look.

2. FFmpeg — Multimedia Swiss Army Knife

FFmpeg is the closest thing to a universal tool for audio and video. You can convert any format to almost any other format, trim a clip, extract audio from a video, layer streams, adjust frame rate, or transcode a file into streaming-ready chunks — all from one command. It's actually running under the hood of most audio and video software you already use.

ffmpeg -i input.wav output.mp3

For musicians who record or work with field recordings, FFmpeg is essential for batch-converting files, resampling, or splitting long recordings into segments. It handles unusual and archival formats without complaint, which makes it especially useful when you're working with samples from unusual sources.

3. SoX — Audio Processing from the Terminal

SoX (Sound eXchange) is sometimes called the "Swiss Army knife of audio." It can trim, concatenate, mix, resample, apply effects, and analyze audio files entirely from the command line. When installed, it also gives you a play command for quick playback straight from the terminal.

# play a file
play input.wav

# resample to 22050 Hz and add reverb
sox input.wav output.wav rate 22050 reverb 50

# lo-fi bitcrusher: reduce to 8-bit depth and 8kHz sample rate
sox input.wav -b 8 -r 8000 lofi_output.wav

# normalize loudness
sox input.wav output.wav norm

The lo-fi command is the closest SoX gets to a bitcrusher — dropping to 8-bit depth and 8kHz sample rate gives you that crunchy, degraded character without any plugins. SoX is particularly useful for batch processing: normalizing a folder full of samples, stripping silence from recordings, or converting a set of WAV files to a specific format before uploading them. It's not flashy, but it gets the job done without any clicking.

4. ImageMagick — Image Manipulation at Scale

ImageMagick lets you resize, crop, rotate, color-correct, composite, and convert images from the terminal. It's especially powerful when you need to apply the same changes to many files at once. A graphic designer who needs to export 200 images at different resolutions can do it with a single command.

convert input.png -resize 1920x1080 -quality 85 output.jpg

For musicians and visual artists making artwork for releases, ImageMagick is useful for generating consistent thumbnails, applying a color treatment across a series of images, or automating promotional graphics at multiple sizes. Once you know the syntax, it's faster than opening Photoshop for every small change.

5. ChucK — Real-Time Audio Programming from the Terminal

ChucK is a programming language for real-time audio synthesis and music that you run directly from the terminal. Write a .ck file, run it with chuck, and it plays audio immediately. You can even add and remove files while the program is already running, which makes it genuinely useful for live performance.

chuck mySynth.ck
chuck + newPart.ck

ChucK's timing model is precise — it was designed from the start to give you exact control over when sounds happen, down to the sample. That makes it a good fit for algorithmic composition, generative music, or any situation where you want to build something that changes over time based on rules you write. It has a smaller community than a DAW, but its documentation is solid and the approach is unique.

6. yt-dlp — Download Audio for Sampling

yt-dlp is a command-line tool for downloading audio and video from over 1,800 websites. For producers and musicians who work with field recordings, archived radio, historical music, or any audio they want as source material, it's essential.

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "https://youtube.com/watch?v=example"

The -x flag extracts audio only, and --audio-format controls the output. You can download whole playlists, set quality options, and write scripts that archive audio from multiple sources automatically. Combined with FFmpeg (which it uses internally), yt-dlp can handle resampling or format conversion on the way out.

7. FIGlet and Toilet — ASCII Text Art

FIGlet and Toilet turn plain text into large ASCII art. FIGlet has hundreds of font options and produces block lettering in pure ASCII, while Toilet adds color and Unicode support.

Install them with:

# macOS
brew install figlet toilet

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install figlet toilet

Then try them out:

figlet -f slant "HELLO"

    __  __________    __    ____
   / / / / ____/ /   / /   / __ \
  / /_/ / __/ / /   / /   / / / /
 / __  / /___/ /___/ /___/ /_/ /
/_/ /_/_____/_____/_____/\____/

toilet --gay "make music"

               #                                           "
 mmmmm   mmm   #   m   mmm          mmmmm  m   m   mmm   mmm     mmm
 # # #  "   #  # m"   #"  #         # # #  #   #  #   "    #    #"  "
 # # #  m"""#  #"#    #""""         # # #  #   #   """m    #    #
 # # #  "mm"#  #  "m  "#mm"         # # #  "mm"#  "mmm"  mm#mm  "#mm"

These are more playful than practical, but they have genuine creative uses: generating headers for README files, adding personality to scripts or live-coding setups, making text-based title cards, or adding flavor to terminal-based performance tools. If you perform with a visible screen, a live-generated ASCII title can be a surprisingly effective visual element.

8. Pandoc — Universal Document Converter for Writers

Pandoc converts between nearly every document format imaginable: Markdown, HTML, EPUB, PDF, Word, LaTeX, and more. It's the go-to tool for writers and content creators who work across multiple formats or need to publish the same content in different places.

pandoc manuscript.md -o manuscript.pdf

Songwriters who annotate lyrics in Markdown can export to formatted PDFs in seconds. Writers who work in plain text can publish to the web with one command. Pandoc also supports custom templates, so you can keep consistent formatting across all your exports without ever opening a word processor.

Why CLI Tools Are Worth Learning

Most of these tools have a GUI equivalent somewhere, and that's fine. But learning the command-line version of a tool changes how you think about what's possible. When you can chain commands, write scripts, and automate repetitive steps, your creative workflow speeds up in ways that click-based software can't match.

Auwen takes this philosophy the furthest for live music: it treats the command line not as a utility layer but as the actual instrument. Every command is a musical decision. If that idea appeals to you, it's worth exploring what you can make when you put the keyboard at the center of the creative process.