Comment by graemep
22 days ago
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
22 days ago
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
The problem with CLI isn't typing, its discoverability. Keep in mind conveying what you want done requires knowing what can be done first.
I often get my way through unknown CLI commands by just typing TAB and selecting the option that sounds like what I want. Works, most of the time, I don't think that is really an issue. For most CLI programs you also have a reference/cheat sheet, examples and an interactive hypertext systems of tutorials available.
Many GUI designers these days don't like discoverability and don't think it's important. They prefer to hide everything behind "gestures" that you just have to know somehow.
That is exactly the sort of thing I think could have been improved. We have very little at the moment - autocomplete and some help.
Along with the "-h,--help" options, an option to show common usage examples would be useful. I find it much easier to learn from an example as you can modify and build upon it. Otherwise, it's a case of skimming through the man page and then switching back and forth between the man page and the command that I'm writing. (This is most common with tools that I don't use all the time, yet have expert features such as "ffmpeg")
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