Ask HN: What the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

• cli-guidelines

  48 2,793 5.0 CSS

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

  

• cli

  254 35,528 9.7 Go

  GitHub’s official command line tool

  

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• HomeBrew

  1,284 39,552 10.0 Ruby

  🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

  

Two of my favourites are Watson and Homebrew. Very well thought out.

https://tailordev.github.io/Watson/

https://brew.sh/

• cli

  40 4,637 9.7 Go

  The Docker CLI (by docker)

  

Best: probably that of Docker. https://github.com/docker/cli

Why: it didn't force you to read man pages or look up documentation, but instead allowed every command to explain what it does to you, either when you'd run it with --help, or just no parameters (in case it expects any). Furthermore, invocations of these commands weren't just a long string of arguments, but rather commands that are logically grouped and can essentially be navigated as a tree. All of that made it extremely useful and pleasant, at least in my eyes.

It just feels like it's made to actually be used by developers and to help them as much as possible. Whether you agree with me on that or not, i suggest that you have a look at this excellent talk by Dylan Beattie, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness: The Secret to Happy Code", which talked more about the discoverability of systems and the developer experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFRKrHE8oPo

Nowadays, you can actually use something like Typer for Python to create similarly useful interfaces, which i strongly advise you to have a brief look at: https://typer.tiangolo.com/

Example:

  $ docker

• typer

  88 14,428 8.7 Python

  Typer, build great CLIs. Easy to code. Based on Python type hints.

Best: probably that of Docker. https://github.com/docker/cli

Why: it didn't force you to read man pages or look up documentation, but instead allowed every command to explain what it does to you, either when you'd run it with --help, or just no parameters (in case it expects any). Furthermore, invocations of these commands weren't just a long string of arguments, but rather commands that are logically grouped and can essentially be navigated as a tree. All of that made it extremely useful and pleasant, at least in my eyes.

It just feels like it's made to actually be used by developers and to help them as much as possible. Whether you agree with me on that or not, i suggest that you have a look at this excellent talk by Dylan Beattie, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness: The Secret to Happy Code", which talked more about the discoverability of systems and the developer experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFRKrHE8oPo

Nowadays, you can actually use something like Typer for Python to create similarly useful interfaces, which i strongly advise you to have a brief look at: https://typer.tiangolo.com/

Example:

  $ docker

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

Suggest a related project