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)…
My problem is that it’s a flag and not like
# pacman removeI 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 --removeis almost identical topacman remove, so I don’t know why that is a “problem”.Because it’s not an option but a subcommand.
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.
But its just a matter of 2 dashes. It shouldn’t be a problem.
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 pulland notgit -L,perf annotateand notperf -A. It’s a great semantic difference like<b>vs<h3>. I’m saying this as an Arch user.I don’t think it would make ANY difference if the option was named
git --pullinsteadgit pull(you don’t have to use the single uppercase). That is NOT the same semantic difference between <b> and <h3>, because it (the pull example) operates the same as before. The only difference are the two dashes. I don’t see how this creates confusion or learning difficulties.The prevalent way (except for ancient tools like tar), and thus the norm, is that options are meant to be optional and subcommands are like old “do one thing” Unix commands (do completely different things, can have completely different set of arguments) but you prepend the name of the software in front of them. You can see the impact of this reflected in documentation for argument parsers: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/argparse.html#%3A~%3Atext=Required+options+are+generally+considered+bad+form+because+users+expect+options+to+be+optional https://gobyexample.com/command-line-subcommands#%3A~%3Atext=Command-Line+Subcommands-%2CGo+by+Example%3A+Command-Line+Subcommands%2Cthat+have+their+own+flags.
I know how subcommands work. But that is not the point I am making. Having two dashes in front of it or not like
pacman removeorpacman --removedoes not change how the command operates. It is literally having two dashes or not and therefore is not an issue.Hmm, I don’t know about Pacman, but for example openSUSE’s
zypper removehas a--clean-depsflag, which doesn’t exist on the other subcommands. So, it wouldn’t make sense to have it bezypper --remove --clean-deps…