Earlier quoted context omitted.
The HN crowd are my UX testers. Whatever people don't understand is easily fixed with a git push!
I'll attempt to possibly convert the grandparent comment into something more constructive. I'd note that your tool is probably the appropriate complexity level compared to utilities of the same sort (ie: sed, awk, dd, etc). But let's say we want to improve the UX of the tool for new users. As a strawman, you could offer longhand forms of the mode switching flags for them. For example: bo -n oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2…
That's actually another part that fell between the cracks and I'm attempting to address... Aside from the -n, everything is parsed as a whitespace-delimited stream. They just happen to be passed as command line arguments, but they're really just stream data. So all the input, output, formatting, and data commands can be passed as one big string argument
bo -n "oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011"
bo -n "oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25" "ii2b 1000 2000 3000" "ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011"
echo "oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011" >mycommands.txt
bo -n -i mycommands.txt
echo "oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000" >mycommands1.txt
echo "3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011" >mycommands2.txt
bo -n -i mycommands1.txt -i commands2.txt
echo "oh1l2 Pc if4b 1.5 1.25 ii2b 1000 2000 3000 ih1 ff fe 7a ib1 10001011" | bo -n -i -
echo "if4b 1.5 1.25" >float-32s.txt
echo "ii2b 1000 2000 3000" >int-16s.txt
echo "ih1 ff fe 7a" >hex-bytes.txt
echo "ib1 10001011" >binary-bytes.txt
bo -n -i float-32s.txt -i int-16s.txt -i hex-bytes.txt -i binary-bytes.txt oh1l2 Pc