I'm probably being picky, but I would also include that the CLI be a self-contained binary. I'm tired of managing Python / Ruby / Node versions.
12 Factor CLI Apps
81–90 of 253 posts
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use info browser from Emacs and like it very much. The best benefit is that you can stuff a whole book into info pages - and projects using info usually drop their full manual in there, to be perused off-line and distraction-free.
How do you search for a word inside the whole info documentation of a program (say, gcc), and cycle through all appearances of that word? I never managed to do that (which is trivial for manpages).
Don't know how it works in regular info browser; in Emacs's info browser, incremental search can cover the entire manual (or even all info pages) if it fails to find a phrase on the page you're currently viewing.
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#83 Unless you already know your users will want man pages, I wouldn’t bother also outputting them as they just aren’t used often enough anymore.
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#84Unless you already know your users will want man pages, I wouldn’t bother also outputting them as they just aren’t used often enough anymore. I don't know where this is coming from, me and my colleagues are reading man pages every day. I would be interested how much others read them.
I strongly disagree on this one too.
That's the first place I look for help and it annoys me to no end when a CLI program that doesn't come with one.
I stopped taking seriously the article at that point and quickly skimmed through the rest of it.
Man pages are a great unix culture heritage, please new developers don't give up on them!
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#85I don't agree with 7 and 8. I like silent apps while working, and actually I'm used to applications saying nothing if everything is correct. Also, "outputting something to stdout just because I can" kills scriptability a lot.
Using tables, colors and other stuff requires a lot of terminal support. MacOS terminal, iTerm, Linux terminals supports a lot of stuff, but not always (our team is generally using XTerm for example). Implementing these are acceptable if there's a robust code detecting terminal capabilities and falling back gracefully and without treating these more streamlined terminals as lesser citizens, and this requires a lot of development, head banging and maintenance. If you're accepting the challenge, then go on.
BTW, That unicode spinner is nice. Very nice.
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#86> Follow XDG-spec
Oh, please guys. Some apps even put visible (non .) folders in my home.
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
For people that like man pages (there appears to be lots of you) do you think that man pages are more important than web or in-cli docs? Or just that they should be written in addition to and not missed out on? My (current) position is that they're useful, but not worth the extra effort for most CLIs. It's a cost-benefit thing. I'm genuinely curious as I've never had anyone request man pages in our CLI.
I prefer a well-written man page to any other information. Git (and a few others) do open the man page when invoking `--help`. That's a way to avoid some overhead.
I hate when programs do that. When I type "foo --help", I want concise help message for foo. If wanted foo man page, I would have typed "man foo".
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#88Man I wish OpenVMS was still a thing. All the commands worked the same due to the DCL enforcing it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIGITAL_Command_Language
Non-mobile link:
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#89Unless you already know your users will want man pages, I wouldn’t bother also outputting them as they just aren’t used often enough anymore. I don't know where this is coming from, me and my colleagues are reading man pages every day. I would be interested how much others read them.
I strongly disagree on this one too. That's the first place I look for help and it annoys me to no end when a CLI program that doesn't come with one. I stopped taking seriously the article at that point and quickly skimmed through the rest of it. Man pages are a great unix culture heritage, please new developers don't give up on them!
I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.
Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps
#90> I would skip man pages are they just aren’t used that often anymore. I understand that man pages might represent a minority, but I cannot express enough how wonderful it is to get the full manual of a program without interfacing with the web. Not to mention how powerful that is, since most apps have short names that are difficult to search for, but how accessible that makes the application.
For people that like man pages (there appears to be lots of you) do you think that man pages are more important than web or in-cli docs? Or just that they should be written in addition to and not missed out on? My (current) position is that they're useful, but not worth the extra effort for most CLIs. It's a cost-benefit thing. I'm genuinely curious as I've never had anyone request man pages in our CLI.
In terms of usability web docs are better. But having the docs on the web is not a good thing; there are many advantages to having them locally.
I'd be just as happy with bundled HTML documentation.