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·
    3 months 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/

    • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

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

      • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 months 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·
            3 months 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·
              3 months 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·
                  3 months 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.

        • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          That’s good documentation, not good interface

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

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 months 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·
    3 months 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·
    3 months 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.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    nmon

    That, along with tmux and htop, are installed on everything I have.

    nmon then ld- give me a system health page that shows me where the bottleneck is.

    It’s interesting to see how a system behaves when you’re doing something like a backup… it’s not always what you think.

    • netvor@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Don’t want to sound unappreciative, but the apps you refer to (and others in these threads) are not actually CLI’s but TUI’s.

      • CLI (command line interface) is when all interaction actually happens in the command line, ie. command + arguments. CLI’s are much simpler to implement, have little dependencies (pretty much just argument list, two data streams—stdout and stderr–and exit status) and typically one invocation means one independent task. All this makes CLI’s ideal as building building blocks of (semi-)automated workflows, but many CLI’s are also optimized for direct invocation from interactive shell, eg. by adding features such as output coloring, interactive yes/no steps or command completion (although that part is actually driven by the shell, and is quite independent from the execution of the app.)

      • TUI (text user interface, i think) on the other hand, is more like GUI but replicated within the confines of terminal emulator. The interaction heavily depends on terminal features such as moving cursor, resize notifications, etc. Also when TUI is ran, it’s normally used for zero to may tasks: e.g. I could start htop and investigate no process, 1 process or many, before quitting. Unlike CLI’s, TUI’s pretty much make no sense within automation.

      Don’t get me wrong: I love TUI’s (htop is one of my favorite and thanks for recommending nmon, i’ll have a look)–and often prefer them to GUI’s (eg. my text editor is nvim, which is a TUI app!), but in my post I was specifically interested in exploring CLI’s. I would actually love a similar post to mine but focusing explicitly on TUI’s as opposed to CLI’s.

      Sorry for long post – I hope it can kind of serve as explanation for people who are new to this and stumble upon this thread and aren’t quite familiar with the distinction.