this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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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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[–] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.

[–] Obin@feddit.org 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I'm a huge Emacs user and while I love some of the convenience features (editing the rebase-history, smerge-vc-next-conflict, etc.), but I rarely use magit, one of Emacs' killer features, because I just still prefer the CLI over it. I usually know exactly what I want to do and menus, popups and hotkeys, no matter how good they are, just slow me down.

[–] littleomid@feddit.org 2 points 19 hours ago

How does pressing s to stage, cc to commit, pp to push slow you down in contrast to git add file, git commit -m etc?