mycli

mycli is a command-line client for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona Server with auto-completion and syntax highlighting. Developed by Amjith Ramanujam (dbcli organization, the same team behind pgcli and litecli), mycli has over 11,000 stars as of 2026 and serves as a modern, user-friendly alternative to the standard mysql command-line client. Written in Python using prompt_toolkit, mycli provides intelligent auto-completion and colorful output that the standard mysql client lacks. Key features include: smart auto-completion (suggesting SQL keywords, table names, column names, functions, and views based on the current query context, powered by SQL parsing), syntax highlighting (colorizing SQL keywords, strings, numbers, comments, and operators), multi-line query editing with proper indentation and auto-formatting, query history with full-text search (Ctrl+R for reverse search through previous queries), favorite queries (saving and recalling frequently used queries by name), connection string and credential management (reading from ~/.my.cnf, ~/.mylogin.cnf, and command-line arguments), SSL/TLS connection support, tabular output with aligned columns and terminal-width awareness, expanded display mode for wide tables, pager integration (using less for large results), meta-commands (similar to mysql: \d for describe, \u for use database, \s for status, \q for quit), automatic reconnection on connection drops, SSH tunnel support (--ssh-user, --ssh-host for connecting through bastion hosts), and configurable via ~/.myclirc file with theme customization.