this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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What's your favorite well-designed CLI and why? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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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[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i’ve been a big fan of Jujutsu (jj) since adopting it a few weeks ago. things i used to avoid with git like proper rebasing and focused commits become so much easier, in addition to the benefits of conflicts being easier to handle. the learning curve i thought was going to be grueling only took a couple days to get used to, and honestly interop with GitHub and my team’s particular workflow were the hard parts. so not only is it useful, powerful, and becoming more important to my workflow all the time, it’s a joy to use compared to git.

i guess honorable mention to zoxide, which has basically replaced cd for me since it does everything cd does but also keeps a small db of your most commonly visited directories so you can just do z Downloads or z my_project or whatever from any directory

[–] hades@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

Wanted to mention jj too. It follows a fairly standard pattern of ‘ ’, e.g. ‘jj bookmark create’, allows to abbreviate unambiguous commands (e.g. ‘jj b c’), has a lot of QoL features (such as highlighting unique prefixes of change IDs in the output). Really a lot of thought went into CLI design specifically it seems.