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What's your favorite well-designed CLI and why? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by netvor@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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)..

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[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day 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.