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)…

  • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

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

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 days 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·
          2 days 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”.

          • deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            20 hours ago

            Is there a difference between one dash - vs two dashes – ? I don’t get why it makes sense to use two as its just an extra key press?

            Sorry for going a bit off topic here

            • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
              1·
              20 hours ago

              No problem, it’s always good idea to ask.

              By convention two dashes -- are used for options with long name, such as --remove, while single dash - is used for single letter options such as -R. There can be some extra rules how options are used and combined, but that is not always true for every application. A common implementation is that options with single dash can be combined to have less to press, while double dash options cannot. Meaning if you have options -a -b -c then you could combine them into one bucket as -abc or -ab -c, all equivalent. But you cannot combine --remove -a -b into --abremove in example. There can be some extra rules and some applications handle options bit differently.

          • Aatube@thriv.socialEnglish
            3·
            2 days 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.

    • CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days 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·
        2 days ago

        That’s good documentation, not good interface

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