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CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

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Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#21

Post by ketzo »

njharman wrote: post #17
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

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 comp…

GUIs can be a nightmare. They can also be a way to digest all the tools at your disposal without ever going to a help page. I think there’s definitely a lot to be said for that, particularly for people less used to a command line environment (and I don’t mean my dad trying to play Tetris, I mean a second-year CS student who is still getting used to Terminal).

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#22

Post by fctorial »

faleidel wrote: post #9

While discoverability can be better with GUI's I find that googling things is always better for CLI tools. Most of my CLI search have a one or two lines of bash I can simply copy paste while solutions for GUI programms often involves lot's of screenshots of dropdowns to open and if the look of the application changed or the element's in the dropdown's are not the same it can be hard to follow. Taking not's of how to…

Give cht.sh a try. You'll like it. It kind of does googling for you.

Doesn't work everytime though.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#23

Post by downerending »

dcminter wrote: post #7
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

The VMS operating system had a standardized command line help UX. Typing HELP gave you an overview of commands available (Curses style) and you could drill down into more specific commands from that. If you knew the command but not the flags then you could add the HELP flag to get more and more specific information. See page 1-18 and 1-19 of the user guide: https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/vms-user-manual.pdf We had…

On the one hand, I recall that fondly. On the other hand, a modern Linux box might have thousands of commands, and I'm not sure that VMS HELP could handle that well.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#24

Post by bch »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

> The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability [...] there are like a bazillion commands and it takes forever to read through the docs...

I think that’s a design issue - what GUI element (menus, buttons, ...) is going to solve this in a way that couldn’t also be applied to the CLI?

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#25

Post by downerending »

njharman wrote: post #17
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

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 comp…

Not to mention that GUI designers have a penchant for moving things around in the interface on every release. So even if you knew where that thing was, you don't necessary know now. Consider Microsoft Office, for example. Ugh.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#26

Post by closeparen »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

Tab completion and fuzzy finding are at least pointed in the right direction. Subcommand structure is also relatively easier to discover: you can walk the tree and see what the other options are at each node. Much more discoverable than having a lot of top-level flags.

Finally, I think the architecture of man pages is all wrong: examples should always be primary, exhaustive descriptions of every little option are reference material and a last resort.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#27

Post by nerdponx »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"

I've thought about this a lot. The answer, I think, is to have a "reverse index" of tasks that you can do with the tool and their corresponding commands or recipes.

For example, man pages are typically organized alphabetically by option or subcommand. I'm envisioning a section of documentation - maybe a separate man page or just something on a website - that looks like this (e.g. for rsync):

    I want to ...

      Transfer files within the local filesystem
          rsync dir1/ dir2
      Transfer files within the local filesystem & create a new directory
          rsync dir1 dir2         # Note the lack of trailing slash on dir1
      Preserve access times
          Use -t/--times
      Recurse into directories
          Use -r/--recursive
You can construct a lot of interesting recipes in this format. Rsync, Make, Find, Git, Docker, and many others all could benefit from this kind of treatment.

Such a document would be:

- Browsable and therefore discoverable

- Easy to search with plain text (can be optimized by making sure key words are inserted in the description text)

- A useful reference if you can't remember this or that specific incantation

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#28

Post by wnevets »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

My patience is so bad when it comes to cli discoverability I just skip to googling what I want to do.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#30

Post by ashton314 »

closeparen wrote: post #26
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. 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. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…

Tab completion and fuzzy finding are at least pointed in the right direction. Subcommand structure is also relatively easier to discover: you can walk the tree and see what the other options are at each node. Much more discoverable than having a lot of top-level flags. Finally, I think the architecture of man pages is all wrong: examples should always be primary, exhaustive descriptions of every little option are ref…

tldr [0] fills the missing piece you mention: good examples of common actions. (Though I use the Rust implementation tealdeer [1])

[0]: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr [1]: https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer

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