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Command Line Interface Guidelines

Command Line Interface Guidelines

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Comments (16)

  • eikenberry
    > Use a pager (e.g. less) if you are outputting a lot of text.If I wanted to use a pager I'd pipe the output to a pager, no pipe to pager means I want it all dumped to STDOUT. So annoying.
  • hankbond
    > Whatever software you’re building, you can be absolutely certain that people will use it in ways you didn’t anticipate. Your software will become a part in a larger system—your only choice is over whether it will be a well-behaved part.good advice
  • inetknght
  • esalman
    I have used click/typer packages to build some python-based CLI programs. It's easy and user-friendly way to build, but the amount of time it takes for python to start the environment followed by the actual program to do anything is annoying.
  • Grom_PE
    For comfortable reading, I just had to figure out what on this webpage causes Chromium to drop subpixel rendering, and it's not this: html { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; } it's this: #TableOfContents { backdrop-filter: blur(3px); } A panel that overlaps content only on narrow screens disables subpixel rendering for the entire text. Thanks Chromium. Not an issue on Firefox, btw.
  • kazinator
    > A command is saying too little when it hangs for several minutes and the user starts to wonder if it’s broken.Nope. For debugging the program, it is nice to have some debug tracing option, but if it's not the program's specification to produce output, it should not produce any. If the program's specification is that it produces a certain output after a certain calculation, then it shall not produce any other output, even if that calculation takes three weeks."cp -r from to" is supposed to be quiet until it's done or hits an error.It would be nice to have an agreed-upon protocol for progress reporting. For instance, imagine of we had file descriptor 3 as "stdprogress". Programs could dump specially formatted messages there which the parent job control shell could intercept and turn into a progress display (with multiple rows for pipeline elements and such). It's not bad; but fluff like this can't be in band with the output, or at least not by default.