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)…

  • jonathan@piefed.socialEnglish
    17·
    29 days ago

    Not what you asked, but anything that uses a single hyphen for longopts can just fuck off. I’m talking to you Terraform.

    • netvor@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      29 days ago

      Did not want to respond but this is hilarious.

      To be fair, really old CLI’s, like from the time when X.org was the new stuff, this style used to be more common. That was before “GNU style” (using single dash for single-letter bundle-able options and double dash for long options) became prevalent.

      But yeah, if you see -foo then you know the program is old enough that regular colonoscopy is recommended, and the original author is probably retired or “passed away at the ripe age of …”.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    29 days 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/

  • Obin@feddit.org
    9·
    29 days ago

    I think git is the obvious choice, both in ergonomics and flexibility (custom commands). But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

    • JayleneSlide@lemmy.world
      3·
      29 days ago

      But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

      Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.

      • Obin@feddit.org
        1·
        29 days ago

        That article doesn’t actually criticize the structure of git’s CLI, just the way the application operates and the philosophy behind it. fossil’s CLI actually seems to take a lot of inspiration from git, except it’s way less complex, because fossil doesn’t “need” that complexity (i.e. can’t do it).

        From a cursory reading, I disagree with most philosophical points made. Many of the scenarios and user testimony are complete nothing-burgers. I haven’t tried it for any length of time, but I think I prefer a fast, optimized, flexible tool over an integrated everything-but-the-kitchen-sink opinionated kind of thing that forces you into doing things their way or the highway, no matter how good it actually is. But as OP said, this is about the CLI, not the applications.

          • Obin@feddit.org
            51·
            29 days ago

            It smelled like an easily recognizable mentality from the start, and your last comment just confirms that for me. I’ve seen it elsewhere and I try to stay away from it where I can. But I wish you luck and joy using your chosen set of tools though. It’s great there are alternatives for everything in FOSS.

  • CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
    6·
    29 days 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.

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
      2·
      28 days 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.

    • carmo55@lemmy.zip
      2·
      29 days ago

      Pacman flags not being idempotent (-SS, yy, uu and such existing) is so unbelievably horrible that I can’t use arch just because of it.

        • carmo55@lemmy.zip
          5·
          29 days ago

          The flag -y refreshes the package list (like apt update). For some reason, you use the flag -yy to force it to clear the whole package list and redownload everything.

          To allow package downgrades when upgrading you use -uu.

          These are very commonly suggested fixes to arch package management problems, for example when you leave your arch install to suit for too long, it will be impossible to update it because of dependency problems. So you google it and people are saying to run “pacman -SSyyuu” or other such commands.

          Those additional options should be their own flags, command line flags should be idempotent (it should flip a switch on, doing it multiple times shouldn’t change anything).

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    4·
    29 days ago

    Honestly, incus.

    I know it’s not strictly a utility, but holy cow, Stephane Graber and his team have put the work into that product, such that anything you can do in the ui can be done in the CLI, and more.

    Tab completion entries for all the resource types (storage, instances, image repos, etc), help entries for everything, it brings a tear to the eye.

    I once thought it was cool to have standardised man entries, but even better is context-sensitive --help entries that work well. Almost all the discovery I’ve made using incus, I’ve made using the commands themselves.

    It’s a real testament to how putting in the documentation work might be tedious, but it is a boon to both users and devs.

  • brianpeiris@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    28 days ago

    I like the trend of refining existing tools. You take tried-and-true commands and shave off the rough edges and quirks. I use ripgrep instead of grep, fd instead of find, scm_breeze on top of git, dust instead of du, duf instead of df, z over cd, and xh instead of curl

  • Bricked@feddit.org
    3·
    29 days ago

    There are many modern alternatives to common Unix commands, often written in rust, or provided in Nushell, that showcase that. Here are some common themes I like:

    Good defaults: You shouldn’t have to memorize tar -xzvf just to extract a tar file; The thing you’re most likely to want to do should be the default. But other use cases should still be achievable through the use of flags. Make simple thing easy and difficult things possible.

    Subcommands: It helps separate and discover the different functions of a CLI. Paired with a help subcommand, you can quickly look up information for the subcommand you’re actually interested in.

    Domain specific languages: Many problems already have a solution in the form of a DSL, such as Regex or SQL. My favourite example for this is httpie, which lets you specify the type, body and parameters of an HTTP request without touching any flags.

    I also much prefer long flags over short ones, because they are self-documenting.

    • Black616Angel@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      29 days ago

      I actually like tar. Yes, it could have a default, but its also from another time. And remembering Xtract Zip File is not that hard. (v is for verbose for those wondering)

      • hobata@lemmy.ml
        1·
        29 days ago
        extract () {
  if [ $# -ne 1 ]
  then
    echo "Error: No file specified."
    return 1
  fi
    if [ -f "$1" ] ; then
        case "$1" in
            *.tar.bz2) tar xvjf "$1"   ;;
            *.tar.gz)  tar xvzf "$1"   ;;
            *.tar.xz)  tar xvf "$1"    ;;
            *.tar.zst) tar axvf "$1"   ;;
            *.xz)      xz -kd "$1"     ;;
            *.bz2)     bunzip2 "$1"    ;;
            *.gz)      gunzip "$1"     ;;
            *.tar)     tar xvf "$1"    ;;
            *.tbz2)    tar xvjf "$1"   ;;
            *.tgz)     tar xvzf "$1"   ;;
            *.lzma)    unlzma "$1"     ;;
            *.rar)     unrar x "$1"    ;;
            *.zip)     unzip "$1"      ;;
            *.Z)       uncompress "$1" ;;
            *.7z)      7z x "$1"       ;;
            *.exe)     cabextract "$1" ;;
            *.deb)     ar x "$1"       ;;
            *.jar)     jar xf "$1"     ;;
            *)         echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via extract" ;;
        esac
    else
        echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
    fi
}
  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    3·
    29 days 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.

  • JakoJakoJako13@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    29 days ago

    Ncmpcpp. I’ve been using it for so long that using other cli music players is almost a no go. Learning a new muscle memory wouldn’t be worth it. Album art would be nice but I’m listening to music and staring at the album art for hours. The metadata editor is really nice. It’s old reliable.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    29 days 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·
      19 days 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.

  • chrash0@lemmy.world
    1·
    29 days ago

    i’ve been a big fan of Jujutsu (jj) since adopting it a few weeks ago. things i used to avoid with git like proper rebasing and focused commits become so much easier, in addition to the benefits of conflicts being easier to handle. the learning curve i thought was going to be grueling only took a couple days to get used to, and honestly interop with GitHub and my team’s particular workflow were the hard parts. so not only is it useful, powerful, and becoming more important to my workflow all the time, it’s a joy to use compared to git.

    i guess honorable mention to zoxide, which has basically replaced cd for me since it does everything cd does but also keeps a small db of your most commonly visited directories so you can just do z Downloads or z my_project or whatever from any directory