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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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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[–] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day 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.