Anil DashLOL I stepped away from Mastodon for a couple hours and everybody is VERY MAD that I made jokes about CLIs. I use them every day, guys, it's gonna be okay. I promise I did not hurt Zork's feelings. It is, however, a factual statement that CLIs are not discoverable user interfaces and they are a poor choice for mainstream audiences; this debate was settled long ago.
Steve Leach@anildash We *used* to have *documentation* and things didn't have to be "discoverable".
Kevin Boyd (he/him) 🇨🇦@stevenaleach @anildash I was there and I disagree. Otherwise, why did the acronym RTFM need to exist?
(Then again, today I am writing a CLI/possibly eventually TUI tool. Yes, in 2025.)
@kboyd @anildash Ah, but these days there usually is no FM to read. And if there is no FM, then you need to fall back on being intuitive, obvious,, and "discoverable".
But of course folks used to CLI will read --help and pick up on how to use a tool quickly. But someone has to actually *be* a CLI user first and their computer didn't ship with a manual explaining how to use the CLI. It just shipped with a desktop they can click around on and figure out how to use.