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)…

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    1 month ago

    I always thought openSUSE’s package manager zypper has quite a few neat ideas:

    • It offers two-letter shorthands for subcommands, so zypper install→ zypper in, update → up, remove → rm.
    • When it lists what packages it will install or remove, it will list them with the first letter highlighted in a different color, kind of like so: fish git texlive
      This makes it really easy to visually scan the package list, and since it’s sorted alphabetically, it also makes it easier to find a particular package you might be looking for.
      And while there’s separate lists for packages to be added vs. updated vs. removed, they also color those letters in green vs. yellow vs. red, so you can immediately see what’s what.
    • When it lists items (other than packages), it prints an ID number, too.
      So, zypper repos gives you a list of your repositories, numberered 1, 2, 3 etc., and then if you want to remove a repo, you can run zypper removerepo 3.
    • When you run a zypper search, it prints the results in a nicely formatted table.

    Documentation: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/zypper/

  • CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 month 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.

    • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Personally I dislike pacman as it uses capital-letter flags as subcommands while I’m used to actual subcommands

      • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 month 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.

          • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
            1·
            1 month 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”.

            • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
              2·
              1 month 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.

                • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
                  2·
                  1 month 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.

      • CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        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.

        • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          That’s good documentation, not good interface

          Edit: For example you could’ve had pacman sync -h instead

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 month ago

      This is where a man page comes in but alas, but some (perhaps even most) of them are fucking horrible. The core incantation is either too dumbed-down or (more often) too long-winded.

      Some good ones I can praise are netcat, ghostscript and 7z. Special praise goes to the Library Funtions Manual entries like signal and exit.

      Bad ones ones in my book are vim (too short), ffmpeg (a simple reordering of sections would make it quite a bit better, like moving the less common flags lower down the page) and git starts of strong but ends up being way too detailed and unstructured.

      I could go listing examples for days, so I might as well stop now.

  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 month ago

    Pure cli or also TUI? When it comes to TUI probably yazi is my most used tool right now, use it pretty much every day. For pure cli i would probably give my vote to sed. I use the crap out of it in a bunch of scripts. For example i switch my themes with it by replacing whatever import i had in the config to the desired theme, then reload the programs.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    2·
    1 month ago

    My RSS shell script that simply dumps the XML’s content nicely formatted on stdout. Seriously, why do all of them have to impose some opinionated TUI on me? Terminals can do bold, dim and underline, that’s enough.

    Sorry no, not public. It’s faulty and ugly and is missing features (multiple sources for one) and i want to rewrite it in python since at least 2 years.

  • Marty_TF@lemmy.zip
    1·
    1 month ago

    ranger and its clones. sane defaults (tho i would prefer if the borders were on by default, at least when not in a tty), extensions, customizations and a very fast builtin hotkey popup (when pressing y for yank it the lists all related options and hotkeys)

    but in the end it is a very simple but powerful file manager that works locally and over ssh, to the point that i dont even have a graphical one installed anymore