netvor

What's your favorite well-designed CLI and why?

https://lemmy.world/post/44771657

What's your favorite well-designed CLI and why? - Lemmy.World

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)…

2:07pmWeb
Show threadCodenameDarlen10h ago

I like CLI tools that everything I need can be found in a short command --help call, if I don’t need to use man command it’s even better.

I’ve used poor CLI tools for example adb you type this and you get almost a scientific article with more than 100 flags to use. No I don’t want to need to use grep.

A good one would be pacman it separates clearly what it does instead of shoving it all in a single command.

Show threadAatube10h ago
Personally I dislike pacman as it uses capital-letter flags as subcommands while I’m used to actual subcommands
Show threadbradboimler9h ago
Why in the world is -S used for install?
Show threadthingsiplay8h ago
-S stands for “sync”. You are syncing to the online database.
Show threadthingsiplay8h ago
You can use long option names instead too, as each capital letter mode has a long option name, such as -R --remove and -S --sync.
Show threadAatube8h ago
My problem is that it’s a flag and not like # pacman remove
Show threadthingsiplay8h ago
I 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 --remove is almost identical to pacman remove, so I don’t know why that is a “problem”.
Show threadAatube7h ago

Because it’s not an option but a subcommand.

as in standard option processing in GNU / Linux

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.

Show threadthingsiplay7h ago
But its just a matter of 2 dashes. It shouldn’t be a problem.
Show threadAatube7h ago
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 pull and not git -L, perf annotate and not perf -A . It’s a great semantic difference like <b> vs <h3>. I’m saying this as an Arch user.
Show threadthingsiplay7h ago
I don’t think it would make ANY difference if the option was named git --pull instead git 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.
Show threadAatube7h ago
The prevalent way (except for ancient tools like tar), and thus the norm, is that options are meant to be optional and subcommands are like old “do one thing” Unix commands (do completely different things, can have completely different set of arguments) but you prepend the name of the software in front of them. You can see the impact of this reflected in documentation for argument parsers: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/argparse.html#::text=Required%20options%20are%20generally%20considered%20bad%20form%20because%20users%20expect%20options%20to%20be%20optional https://gobyexample.com/command-line-subcommands#::text=Command%2DLine%20Subcommands-,Go%20by%20Example:%20Command%2DLine%20Subcommands,that%20have%20their%20own%20flags.
argparse — Parser for command-line options, arguments and subcommands

Source code: Lib/argparse.py Tutorial: This page contains the API reference information. For a more gentle introduction to Python command-line parsing, have a look at the argparse tutorial. The arg...

Python documentation
Show threadthingsiplay6h ago
I know how subcommands work. But that is not the point I am making. Having two dashes in front of it or not like pacman remove or pacman --remove does not change how the command operates. It is literally having two dashes or not and therefore is not an issue.
Show threadjonathan9h ago
Not what you asked, but anything that uses a single hyphen for longopts can just fuck off. I’m talking to you Terraform.
Show threadthingsiplay8h ago
I hate that too. 7z does that and its horrible.
Show threaddavel6h ago
I blame Sun/Java for popularizing this. I give find a pass due to its age.
find (Unix) - Wikipedia

Show threadthingsiplay8h ago

I don’t think there is some exceptional good CLI interfaces. If anything, you either notice the interface is bad or unconventional or it is cluttered, because it has lots of functionality. It also depends if it “should” fit into the Linux eco system (similar commandline system and logic) or is this tool used for any operating system. I have my own scripts as wrapper for some tools, so they are excluded from discussions here. Note I think the discussion is about commandline interfaces that operate non interactive (in other words no “live” TUIs or interactive editors), so no Vim or htop.

Tools like yt-dlp or awk or find or git are complex and overloaded with functionality, because it offers so much and has to offer all of that. Or the command works different, because of its nature of calling another command like parallel. Then there are commandlines that just deviates from the standard and bugs me a lot. One of the worst offenders to me is 7z from package extra/7zip in the Arch repositories. But it is not a standard GNU tool, therefore it does its own thing.

So in the end, I do not think there is an exceptional good CLI, only bad or complicated ones. As long as it follows Linux standards its good to go. Often the best Rust CLI tools have pretty good ones that could be listened as standouts, but none specific in particular.