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)…

  • Obin@feddit.org
    1·
    15 hours ago

    It comes down to my ADHD brain being unable to handle the context switches with windows popping in and out, staged diff views, unstaged diff views, and the mental model of which state everything is currently in. Whereas with the CLI I type out the whole operation in advance and get a nice history of the steps I have taken before, with magit I need to build up on the fly with interactive feedback I have react to, or at the very least can get distracted by. My “just slow me down” maybe sounded like “I am so fast, magit can’t keep up”, whereas I meant it more like “I can’t keep up with magit and constantly have to recheck things and correct mistakes”. For example my preferred workflow is relatively git (add|reset|checkout) -p heavy, where I can make sure the changes that get staged match exactly what I want, with undo/redo working as expected since it’s just a normal text buffer, whereas with magit I’ll go into the diff and press s/u on lines/regions with things just popping in and out of existence and I have to go over to the opposite diff and reparse that to fix a mistake I made.

    It’s very similar to other GUIs in that way for me. Or modal editing for example: I can’t for the life of me keep track of what mode the editor is in at any moment. With vim/evil I even had the muscle memory going at one point, but I would constantly type commands in insert mode and text into normal mode leading to all kinds of random things happening. I could be the fastest typist in the world and vim would still slow me down. However Emacs is perfect for designing a workflow to mitigate this, since it allows me to harmonize and simplify many of the keybindings to do similar things in all modes, customize window management (display-buffer-alist) to be less distracting and disable other distracting commands I don’t need entirely.