Command Line Interface Guidelines

• cli-guidelines

  47 2,782 3.6 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

• cobra

  129 35,985 7.8 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

• InfluxDB

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• try

  12 5,121 7.8 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

• pass-import

  403 768 8.4 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.

• prettier

  440 48,241 9.8 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

• finstem

  6 15 7.4 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.

• statifier

  1 33 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

• WorkOS

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