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Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

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Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#11
post #6

git

it was awful, it is getting better and I think it's a good example in several occasions (I mean when it's not an unpredictable sequence of commands that need to be passed to accomplish something outside of a regular workflow)

I enjoy how much git-flow-avh dumbs down git for me. I've been using regular old git commands for years but inevitably end up in some weird merge conflict with myself and possibly a slightly inebriated version of me that was coding the night before.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#12
post #7

I like npm-check https://github.com/dylang/npm-check it has a really useful and easy to use UI, on of the nicest terminal UI driven applications I have used. Edited: to use TUI instead of CLI

TUI is not CLI. htop and these curses interfaces was TUI

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm interested in both.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#14
post #6

git

it was awful, it is getting better and I think it's a good example in several occasions (I mean when it's not an unpredictable sequence of commands that need to be passed to accomplish something outside of a regular workflow)

I'm using git cli. Already tried sourceTree, gitkraken, intellij plugins, atom plugins.... all these attempts ended up in "I do not know which branch I am in" or "How do I get a diff to remote"?

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#15
I would recommend that you check out the Heroku CLI Style Guide: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cli-style-guide

There are many different teams within Heroku that need to provide interactions for developers via CLI whether its for dynos or data services. The guide was a way to codify building a consistent interaction that all product managers and engineers could follow. Disclaimer: I work for heroku.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#16
post #4

Serverless ( https://serverless.com ) has a nice experience. I believe it is built using inquirer.js ( https://github.com/SBoudrias/Inquirer.js ) I've recently built an internal tool with inquirer and it was a really nice development and user experience. I haven't figured out the best way to test the interactions though. termUI in go is also nice if you need graphing and viz for a dashboard like command line.

I think many/most Node TUI's use Inquirer. I have mixed feelings about it. Python has several library's that provide lower-level constructs for building CLI and TUI's. Then they provide examples for using the library to implement a common pattern or prompt. Inquirer gives you some ready-made prompts but doesn't provide any help/convenience for creating your own prompt. It seems like the wrong level of abstraction.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#17

I would recommend that you check out the Heroku CLI Style Guide: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cli-style-guide There are many different teams within Heroku that need to provide interactions for developers via CLI whether its for dynos or data services. The guide was a way to codify building a consistent interaction that all product managers and engineers could follow. Disclaimer: I work for heroku.

This is great. Exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#18
`parted` is pretty good, in an old-school way.

The only thing I'd personally ask for is if you offer an interactive interface, make sure you can execute the exact same commands on the plain CLI. Also (yeah, two things) support --help and --version (as well as -h and -v) out of the box.

Color, layouts (other than those required for readability), and other things just don't really matter as much, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#20
post #4

Serverless ( https://serverless.com ) has a nice experience. I believe it is built using inquirer.js ( https://github.com/SBoudrias/Inquirer.js ) I've recently built an internal tool with inquirer and it was a really nice development and user experience. I haven't figured out the best way to test the interactions though. termUI in go is also nice if you need graphing and viz for a dashboard like command line.

I think many/most Node TUI's use Inquirer. I have mixed feelings about it. Python has several library's that provide lower-level constructs for building CLI and TUI's. Then they provide examples for using the library to implement a common pattern or prompt. Inquirer gives you some ready-made prompts but doesn't provide any help/convenience for creating your own prompt. It seems like the wrong level of abstraction.

Which python libraries do you prefer?

Inquirer is def the HTML inputs of the terminal but I got pretty far with it. My use case was Fairly Simple™ though. What other UI components do you think it's lacking?

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