Command Line Interface Guidelines

1. cli-guidelines

   1 56 3,212 5.0 CSS

   A guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.

   

   Seems they took a small step back from their previous "don't bother with man pages" stance. Now it's "Consider providing man pages."

   I still find it a rather shocking order of priority, honestly.

   https://clig.dev/#documentation

2. Stream

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3. cobra

   2 146 41,149 7.9 Go

   A Commander for modern Go CLI interactions

   

   We recently chose cobra[1] to create a cli application. It comes with so many best practices already packaged like autocompletions, help texts etc. etc.

   [1]: https://github.com/spf13/cobra

4. try

   3 12 5,295 5.5 Shell

   Inspect a command's effects before modifying your live system

   

   "try" is not a prefix (like watch, nice, etc) uses an overlayfs in order to be able to see and accept or reject changes to your filesystem from a command

   https://github.com/binpash/try

5. pass-import

   4 423 850 8.0 Python

   A pass extension for importing data from most existing password managers

   

   That way you can delegate the password handling to another program, e.g. a password manager like pass(1) (https://www.passwordstore.org/) or some interactive graphical prompt.

6. prettier

   5 487 50,713 9.9 JavaScript

   Prettier is an opinionated code formatter.

   

   Exactly. This is implemented by the Javascript code formatter Prettier [1] where you have to pass `--write` in order to overwrite an unformatted file.

   [1]: https://prettier.io

7. finstem

   6 8 21 3.8 Python

   Simple Finnish stem word finder

   

   I know it goes without saying for most of us here, but actually being a heavy terminal user yourself is one of the most important things to understand how to design CLIs. It helps a ton to understand the ecosystem you live in, not just your own organism.

   Example: Something I did a few months back ago for a tiny personal project @ https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem was implement `--format CSV`, `TSV` and `JSON` flags. I haven't had need for any of these myself, but they exist so any future people who want to use `csvkit`, `awk` and `jq` respectively to wrap around my program have easy ways to do so. That's not stuff I would have had the instincts to do if I wasn't myself a user of all 3 of those programs.

8. statifier

   7 1 46 10.0 C

   Tool for creating portable self-containing Linux executable

   

   Yeah, I wish this kind of thing[0] were a core POSIX tool which worked reliably on all systems and binaries. Bit of an oversight, that.

   [0]: https://github.com/greenpau/statifier

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