Question

I npm installed the node-term-ui package, but I keep getting “Unexpected string” errors, then I noticed the syntax in the files looks different, and realized it’s CoffeeScript which I’ve never used before.

How do I make it work?

Answer 1

zeMirco’s answer is correct, but let me add more info: What node-term-ui is doing is very, very unusual. The author has set main in their package.json to point to a .coffee file, rather than compiling that file to a .js file. They also haven’t noted this in their README. I see that there’s now discussion about this at https://github.com/jocafa/node-term-ui/issues/2.

The need for a .js file may not have occurred to the author because, if you’re running a .coffee file, you can require other .coffee files. In fact, all you need to require .coffee files directly is to require the coffee-script module first. So what you could do in your JS file is:

require('coffee-script');
var TermUI = require('node-term-ui');

Be sure to add coffee-script as a project dependency first.

I hope the author will modify the library so that CoffeeScript isn’t required to use it, but that workaround should be easier than zeMirco’s solution of compiling the module manually.