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Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#2

Post by codemusings »

Worst: sqlplus by Oracle. No autocomplete, no backspace, no history function. It's like nobody ever inside Oracle ever had to use this craptastic piece of software to accomplish anything.

EDIT: Oops backspace works. Might have been a combination of putty and sqlplus. Nevermind.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#3

Post by rwmj »

My niggle is with commands that cannot be composed, ie. consumed by other tools or shell scripts or built into pipelines. There are lots of small things that break composition: Not exiting with a non-zero code on error, sending error messages to stdout, not producing output that can be easily parsed by another command. Too many commands suffer from one of these problems, unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#4

Post by sergiotapia »

worst is git by far.

i'm used to it now but when I was learning, "what the fuck did `git reset --hard` do? where is --soft? Is there a no-flag version? What the fuck did I leave mercurial for. God damn I miss svn."

I still kind of miss Mercurial and TortoiseHG.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#8

Post by MontyCarloHall »

codemusings wrote: post #2

Worst: sqlplus by Oracle. No autocomplete, no backspace, no history function. It's like nobody ever inside Oracle ever had to use this craptastic piece of software to accomplish anything. EDIT: Oops backspace works. Might have been a combination of putty and sqlplus. Nevermind.

A lot of people forget that the default shells of many *nix systems through at least the mid 90s did not support any of these. No line editing, no interactive history (primitive !-based history doesn’t count), no completion.

Occasionally I’ll still encounter an environment that only has a minimalist implementation of sh (e.g. some busybox builds) and be totally stymied. It amazes me how much people accomplished on old *nix systems with such abysmal usability.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#9

Post by jasode »

The ImageMagick utility mogrify.

By default (without specifying extra command-line options) it overwrites the input files. [1]

In decades of computer use, that is the only command line tool that tricked me into destroying my data because I didn't realize it works differently from all the other tools I use that don't do that.

Usually, a command line utility with less options specified is relatively "safe" and you have to add extra syntax to make it "unsafe".

It was definitely a violation of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

EDIT reply to: >The whole reason for mogrify's existence is that it overwrites the original image file.

Sure, I understand that but many other destructive tools will have safety UI features such as creating ".bak" backup files. That's what many other command line tools do including image utilities. So something like mogrify could have been designed with hypothetical syntax as "mogrify -nobackups". The principle is to type extra syntax to make it more dangerous while still accomplishing the (observable) goal of changing the original files.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1575004/imagemagick-how-to-a...

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