clideveloper-toolsterminal

qr codes from your terminal.

generate wifi, vcard, email qr codes from the command line without constructing raw strings.

so i needed a wifi qr code for the office. opened my terminal because that’s where i live. ran qrencode and typed my wifi password as a string.

then i remembered wifi qr codes aren’t just plain text. the format is this:

WIFI:T:WPA;S:MyNetwork;P:xK9$mN2p;;

yea. you have to build that string yourself. the semicolons, the T: prefix for encryption type, the S: for SSID. miss one semicolon and the phone just stares at you.

tried segno too. same deal. these tools take a raw string and turn it into a QR. they don’t care what’s inside the string. you’re on your own for the encoding part.

i spent 12 minutes googling the wifi QR string format. twelve. for something that should take five seconds.

this is the thing that bothered me

every CLI QR tool works the same way: give me text, i give you squares. but nobody asks what kind of QR you’re making. wifi? vcard? email? doesn’t matter to them. you construct the string, you pass it in, you pray you got the spec right.

vcards are worse btw. the format looks like this:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Bhatkar;Pranav
TEL:+919876543210
EMAIL:pranav@example.com
END:VCARD

good luck typing that into a one-liner without messing up a newline.

qrzap does it differently

qrzap understands structured types. you tell it you want a wifi QR, it asks for the ssid and password. you tell it you want a vcard, it asks for name, phone, email. no string construction. no memorizing specs.

three ways to use it.

interactive mode walks you through it step by step. it uses @clack/prompts so it actually looks nice in the terminal, not like a bash script from 2004.

npx qrzap i

it asks what type of QR you want, then collects the fields one by one. picks sensible defaults. shows you a preview right there in the terminal using UTF-8 block characters.

  ████ ██  ████ ██ ████
  █  █ ███ █  █  █ █  █
  ████  █  ████ █  ████
       █ █      ██
  █ ██ ██ █ █ ██ █ ████
  █  ██ █ ██  ██ █
  ████ █  ████  █  ████

that’s your QR. in your terminal. no browser, no file manager, no nothing.

direct mode is for when you know exactly what you want. good for scripts, CI pipelines, automation.

npx qrzap g --type wifi --ssid "OfficeNet" --password "xK9$mN2p" --encryption WPA --format png

outputs a png. you can also do --format svg or --format terminal if you just want to see it on screen.

npx qrzap g --type vcard --name "Pranav Bhatkar" --phone "+919876543210" --email "pranav@example.com" --format svg

that builds the entire vcard string for you. no BEGIN:VCARD nonsense.

email QR codes too:

npx qrzap g --type email --to "hello@qrzap.fun" --subject "hey" --format terminal

the third mode is MCP

if you run npx qrzap with no arguments it starts as an MCP server. this means claude or any MCP client can call it as a tool. ask claude to “make me a wifi qr code for my home network” and it calls qrzap under the hood. but that’s a different blog post.

the part i actually care about

i can pipe things now. i have a script that reads wifi credentials from a config file and generates QR codes for each network. took maybe 15 lines of bash. with qrencode i would’ve needed a helper function just to assemble the wifi string format.

the terminal preview is surprisingly useful too. i ssh into a server, generate a QR, and it renders right there. screenshot it from my phone if i need to. ugly workflow but it works at 2am when you’re too tired to open a browser.

one package. npx qrzap. no global install, no dependencies to manage, runs and

← All posts