CLIs are reified UIs (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#11

Post by kitotik » Wed, May 27, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

Really good autocompletion replete with helper/explanatory text can help a lot with CLI discoverability.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#12

Post by trasz » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

This probably won't work with Unix shell, but some CLIs (JunOS comes to mind) have a context help that's shown when you press "?". But note it's not "?", you don't need to press enter; merely inputting a single "?" character shows possible things you can append to the command line at that point.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#13

Post by hinkley » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

We like to talk about 'organic' in tech but to farmers that meant "pig shit" up until a few decades ago.

The Docker and Git CLI both grew organically. Each new feature had to fit into the gaps between the old features without reusing the same terminology, and sometimes the easiest spot to implement something is not the spot you would first guess it should be. So it gets tacked on somewhere else to avoid coupling.

Rewriting an interface is difficult, and some people do it too often ('upgrade treadmills') or try to avoid doing it at all.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#14

Post by slightwinder » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

> Looking at Docker CLI, there are like a bazillion commands and it takes forever to read through the docs to find out what exactly to use.

Is this really a problem of CLI or just an example of a complex application? If we take for example something like excel or photoshop, then you can't easily figure what to do, even if the doc is directly embedded inside the UI.

> Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn't count.

Why? It's an additional step, but can count as basic knowledge, similar to how someone needs to know how a mouse works and what the buttons do, before they can start using a GUI.

> Like can we combine the advantages of CLI with the discoverability of GUIs?

No, the moment you embedd the discoverabilty of GUI it stops being a CLI. TUI exist, and they do offer the same elements as GUI, just with less flexibility because text and so. But TUI serves a different purpose. You can't automate spatial interfaces as you can automate a cli. You need a dedicated way for allowing this, which is the main reason why CLI is so popular.

What you could do is defining many many APIs and protocols and guidelines, then define your interface in some generic way which allows you to automatic spin out a discoverable interface as also a useful automation-interface. But who wants that? That is extra work.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#15

Post by uhoh-itsmaciek » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

Maybe any CLI that's complex enough to have subcommands should have an "apropos" [1] subcommand to help with discoverability...

[1]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/apropos.1.html

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#16

Post by Someone » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

MPW Commando still hasn’t been beaten, IMO. See my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499855

It may not scale to meta commands such as docker and terraform, though.

You’ll also need something to figure out which commands might help you do whatever you want to do. Apropos and locate help a bit there, but IMO need improvement.

https://pypi.org/project/howdoi/ is an attempt at that. I’ve never used it, so I don’t know how good it is.

In some sense, I guess stackoverflow is the best we have to make the CLI more discoverable.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#17

Post by njharman » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

GUIs are a discoverability nightmare.

I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui.

There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are complete non-convention chaos.

both --help (but not "help " (a reason they are "wrong") and man are 1 level deep and show you the entire ui, all at once. That is definition of discoverable! One action, i've discovered everything.

GUIs are deeply nested. And context sensitive so it may not even be possible to see actions until certain condition is met. The definition of opaque and undiscoverable.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#18

Post by jakear » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

The hundreds of millions of people that use excel with limited to no training would likely beg to differ with the proposition that it isn’t discoverable. I’ve never taken an excel class or read basic excel docs, yet I know how to do basic excel things. That’s literally impossible in a CLI.

Similarly, how many people have trouble saving and quitting a word document? What about vim?

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#19

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#20

Post by ithkuil » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

This! And also even once you find something in a GUI how do you record that and share to somebody else (including you in the future)? I had more success providing a non-technical person eith runbooks with shell commands to copy paste into a terminal to deal with common problems; we tried with GUIs but it was always very hard to work with over the phone (it was also long time ago, and in an airgapped env)