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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[–] Aatube@thriv.social 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The prevalent way (except for ancient tools like tar), and thus the norm, is that options are meant to be optional and subcommands are like old "do one thing" Unix commands (do completely different things, can have completely different set of arguments) but you prepend the name of the software in front of them. You can see the impact of this reflected in documentation for argument parsers: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/argparse.html#%3A%7E%3Atext=Required+options+are+generally+considered+bad+form+because+users+expect+options+to+be+optional https://gobyexample.com/command-line-subcommands#%3A%7E%3Atext=Command-Line+Subcommands-%2CGo+by+Example%3A+Command-Line+Subcommands%2Cthat+have+their+own+flags.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I know how subcommands work. But that is not the point I am making. Having two dashes in front of it or not like pacman remove or pacman --remove does not change how the command operates. It is literally having two dashes or not and therefore is not an issue.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 13 hours ago

Hmm, I don't know about Pacman, but for example openSUSE's zypper remove has a --clean-deps flag, which doesn't exist on the other subcommands. So, it wouldn't make sense to have it be zypper --remove --clean-deps...