Regardless of what the app does and whether the thing that does is particularly useful, powerful or important for what you need to do (or even well implemented), what is a command-line interface that you had a particularly good experience both learning and working with?
In other words, I’m thinking about command line interface design patterns that tend to correlate with good user experience.
“Good user experience” being vague, what I mean is, including (but not limited to)
- discoverability–learning what features are available),
- usability–those features actually being useful,
- and expressiveness–being able to do more with less words without losing clarity,
but if there’s a CLI that has none of those but you still like it, I’d be happy to hear about it.
Edit: Trying to stress more that this post is not about the functionality behind the tool. Looks like most of first responders missed the nuance: whether app x is better than app y because it does x1 ad x2 differently or better does not matter; I’m purely interested in how the command line interface is designed (short/long flags, sub-commands, verbs, nouns, output behaviors)…
I like CLI tools that everything I need can be found in a short
command --helpcall, if I don’t need to useman commandit’s even better.I’ve used poor CLI tools for example
adbyou type this and you get almost a scientific article with more than 100 flags to use. No I don’t want to need to usegrep.A good one would be
pacmanit separates clearly what it does instead of shoving it all in a single command.Personally I dislike pacman as it uses capital-letter flags as subcommands while I’m used to actual subcommands
You can use long option names instead too, as each capital letter mode has a long option name, such as
-R --removeand-S --sync.My problem is that it’s a flag and not like
# pacman removeI don’t get why that is a problem. It’s just an option name with 2 dashes in front. In fact, that is the “correct” way of handling options, as in standard option processing in GNU / Linux. I personally dislike options without dash, but on the other hand it does not bother me enough to be bothered by it.
pacman --removeis almost identical topacman remove, so I don’t know why that is a “problem”.Because it’s not an option but a subcommand.
Guix and standard tooling like perf also use subcommands. I’m used to flags/options modifying the way the same inputs are processed, not completely changing what you give as $1.
But its just a matter of 2 dashes. It shouldn’t be a problem.
You misunderstand me. It’s not about typing it. It’s not conforming to prevalent Linux paradigms which creates artificial confusion and learning difficulties. There’s a reason it’s
git pulland notgit -L,perf annotateand notperf -A. It’s a great semantic difference like<b>vs<h3>. I’m saying this as an Arch user.I don’t think it would make ANY difference if the option was named
git --pullinsteadgit pull(you don’t have to use the single uppercase). That is NOT the same semantic difference between <b> and <h3>, because it (the pull example) operates the same as before. The only difference are the two dashes. I don’t see how this creates confusion or learning difficulties.But you can find a good short description about each option with
-hS. It’s well designed in my opinion because of that, no need to go far to understand it.That’s good documentation, not good interface
Edit: For example you could’ve had
pacman sync -hinsteadWhy in the world is -S used for install?
-Sstands for “sync”. You are syncing to the online database.Pacman flags not being idempotent (-SS, yy, uu and such existing) is so unbelievably horrible that I can’t use arch just because of it.
I’ve never used Arch, can you explain how it behaves?