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Ask HN: How should the CLI be designed today?
I've long thought that the command line is just a bit rubbish, even if it is powerful.
If you were redesigning it today (2016), how would you lay it out and what it do?
E.g. collapse output. Keep more metadata on history. Built in error hints (e.g. google the error, harvest possibilities).
How should the CLI work across microservices and cloud services?
What should the graphical design be?
This is deliberately open. Looking for pet hates and ideas.
- softEngg 10y agoPlan9?
- spelufo 10y agoI used a port of the rc shell for linux as my login shell for a couple of months. I switched back to zsh eventually because rc doesn't have job control and autocompletion. The autocompletion wasn't that big an issue because it can use readline for history completion, and it can be configured so that when you type the start of a command and hit up arrow it will find the last command that started with what you typed. This can be replicated for zsh and bash, and it's arguably as good as autocompletion. I found no convinient work-around for the lack of job control, other than starting a new terminal. How is rc better than bash or zsh? I've read the bash man pages and I couldn't figure out exactly how bash expands commands before executing them. Every time the shell see's an unquoted variable name (e.g. $foo) it will do word splitting, which is why you have to write "$foo" instead, or "${foo}bar" to distinguish "$foo" from "$foobar", etc. Add history and filename expansion and command substitution, weird syntax for control statements... The best feature of rc is that word splitting and globbing happens once, and it results in a list of strings. There is no longer a need to quote variables all the time. No need to use filenames without spaces. Here's what bash does: $ files=*; echo "$files"; echo $files * file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt $ # echo $files -> echo * -> file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt Here's what rc does: $ files=*; echo $files file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt $ # files=(file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt) $ # echo $files -> echo file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt It's similar to the situation for dynamic vs lexical scope. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.html https://github.com/rakitzis/rc https://github.com/rakitzis/rc
- bizzleDawg 10y agoAs an aside, in terms of design and little helpers (e.g. git/virtualenv) powerline shell really made my terminal much more friendly: https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell Idea: proper graphics for data/image/video display. I think it's an interesting idea that a terminal editor can have text only input, but the ability to draw real high-res graphical output. e.g. a canvas to draw your matplotlib diagram in the terminal output or a more graphical version of htop (with time data graphs etc).
- dozzie 10y ago> Idea: proper graphics for data/image/video display. Too late. xterm already has it for a long time (I remember seeing it working as long ago as in 2003 in rxvt, and it was nowhere new thing then). See the screenshot of w3m, a lynx-like web browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m My today's rxvt-unicode also supports this mode.
- J_Darnley 10y agoPeople say Windows' Powershell using some sort of objects rather than a text stream is good. For me I want better control over how my shell records and stores history. I want it to record more and probably not in a flat text file. I don't want it to write commands that fail to disk but I do want them in my history so I can correct my typo and run again. I'd like lines to be rewrapped if I change terminal dimensions. I'd like more automatic pagination (rather than forgetting to use less and nuking your scrollback). I think is an issue with mintty/putty but I'd like its command history to be printed correctly after changing the terminal width. Pet hates: terminal bells that I didn't explicitly ask for; middle click paste; the obscure terminfo file that sometimes controls the features a program uses.
- skykooler 10y agoPowershell is like the Java of shells: object-oriented, but needlessly verbose.
- ctolkien 10y agoEh, I like the Powershell angle here. By default everything is named in lengthy, self explaining names, but there's shorthand aliases for everything. In reality, no one is using `get-childitem` instead of `ls` or `dir` (both of which are simply aliases for `get-childitem`).
- tedmiston 10y agoAutocomplete globally for every command and its subcommands
- michaelmior 10y agoWhile this would be great, I doubt it will ever happen. I don't really see how this possible without support from each command being completed. And not every command is going to do this.
- joelthelion 10y agoMaybe machine learning could help?
- michaelmior 10y agoGoing through man pages would certainly help. Otherwise you're analyzing the source code of scripts or worse, binaries. I won't say it's impossible, but I'm not convinced the effort is worth it. That said, I think it could be made much easier to make completion scripts rather than all the shell-specific stuff that exists now.
- a3n 10y ago--help would be a good thing to learn from too. But again, that assumes that --help or even a man page was implemented.
- tedmiston 10y agoA simple structured list in config seems like a reasonable start. - git - blame - commit - log - ... We could generate this semi-automatically for a lot of commands with a little effort. Perhaps git wasn't the best example to demonstrate a simple one. For existing commands that don't get updated, one could just supply the list from a central repo, not unlike Homebrew Cask.
- myroon5 10y agoDefault support for control-f searching output
- alexkehayias 10y agoEasier inline editing of command args i.e accidentally executing the script when trying to enter a newline.
- pritambaral 10y agoCurrent best solution: set $EDITOR to your favourite editor and Ctrl-x, Ctrl-e.
- woodruffw 10y agoHyperlinking is good, we should do more of that. I have my urxvt configured to open http(s) URLs in my browser, but it would be nice if I could open URLs of arbitrary protocols via handlers. Similarly, being able to distinguish valid pathnames and open them in $EDITOR/$VISUAL (or perhaps via special file-type handlers) would be a nice. Overall, I'm not particularly dissatisfied with the state of the command line in 2016. My experience has been that I make no more (or fewer) mistakes with command-line interfaces than I do with graphical ones, and that spending a few seconds thinking about what I actually want to do prevents me from using the wrong approach (i.e., a graphical or console program) to a problem.
- 0x37 10y agoIf we could start with having working ctrl-c ctrl-v that would be great :). (I know Windows improved on this with 10 but Linux is still lacking) Other than that I wouldn't mind some graphical features, such as being able to display thumbnails of images for example.
- Symbiote 10y agoYou can probably map Super+C and Super+V (i.e. the "Windows Key") to copy and paste in your chosen terminal emulator. (I have done this in KDE's Konsole, so I can paste from a web form I must often use, which somehow blocks the standard Unix/Linux selecting-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste method.)
- tokenizerrr 10y agoOn Linux I usually use Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+V which seems to be bound by default on most terminals. Ctrl+C of course terminates the running program, usually.
- skykooler 10y agoWhy is ctrl-C the shortcut for "terminate", anyway? I would have expected it to be something like ctrl-T.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jaredsohn 10y agofrom wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-C): As many keyboards and computer terminals once directly generated ASCII code, the choice of control-C overlapped with the ASCII end-of-text character. This character has a numerical value of three, as "C" is the third letter of the alphabet. It was chosen to cause an interrupt as it is otherwise unlikely to be part of a program's interactive interface. Many other control codes, such as control-D for the end-of-transmission character, do not generate signals and are occasionally used to control a program. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#STX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#STX
- seanp2k2 10y agoDo this: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLin... And this: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...
- random_upvoter 10y agoIn TCC/LE (a CMD replacement for Windows by JPSoft) there is one little feature that I miss in Powershell because I got so used to it: if you just enter the name of a folder (as if it's a command), you change dir to that folder (so no need to type the 'cd'). In Powershell you just get an error that this thing is not executable. A waste of semantic space, IMO.
- saynsedit 10y agoWould love something that showed you how the current command was going to be parsed as an argument vector before actually submitting the command (pressing return). Would help with spacing and quoting.
- Udo 10y agoMy primary complaint about Unix CLI is that the commands try to do two disparate things simultaneously: outputting text for humans and generating data for consumption by other commands. In a properly designed command line ecosystem (it's far, far too late for that now), there would be good human readable output in one mode, and tools would exchange structured, already escaped data amongst themselves in another mode. Alternatively, the shell would render the output for humans, and tools would just communicate in machine format. Consider for example executing a compression command on all jpg files in a folder and below. Currently, the syntax goes something like this: find . -iname "*jpg" -exec gfxcompress {} \; Naive Unix users would have expected this to be achievable by piping, but no! In reality there is a special syntax of the find command that does this, and it's not completely clear how you would deal with file names further down the line, or how you would achieve further chaining. This syntax is also completely unique to the find command. You can't just plug in another data source and perform the same operation. In a CLI where tools are designed to be chained, it would look something like this: find | match :name="*jpg" |> gfxcompress :name In this example I used an imaginary |> operator to indicate I want something performed on every item, and I can refer to the "name" field of each directory entry directly. If I wanted to filter by time, for example, I might use the :time field instead, without any need for explicit support. If I wanted to mutate the name somewhere in the chain, I could do it. If I wanted to chain additional commands, it would be obvious how. And it would just work. The same goes for error handling. Imagine a compiler spitting out structured error information which you could use directly in other tools without having to parse and interpret it first.
- CWuestefeld 10y agoWindows PowerShell seems to offer exactly what you're looking for.
- Udo 10y agoI'm not a Windows user, so I'm not familiar with it. And "just move to Windows" isn't exactly the kind of solution I was hoping for, if I'm being honest. Some day someone in the vast Linux/Unix ecosystem hopefully sees this problem too and does something about it, but it's a controversial idea at this point.
- z1mm32m4n 10y agoIf you have a little sense of humor, Gary Bernhardt spoke at length about what effect a better terminal environment could have on things like terminal based editors: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
- lsiebert 10y agoYou should have a separate output for humans, instead of having a flag for it, and programs which are the last in a chained series should default to it, but you could also redirect stuff to it in the middle of piping. I'd love if the bash shell language was less clunky.
- modeless 10y agoA standard method for programs to provide help, examples, and tab completion suggestions to the shell. Right now we have man, info, --help, -help, -?, etc, and tab completion is part of the shell rather than the apps. If all of that was standardized the tools could be much better.
- viraptor 10y agoI'd basically like to have powershell. Potentially with a better introspection and attributes so that you can build a more interactive CLI. For example output size estimation + tagging local read-only commands to allow showing some output preview as you combine the commands. On-a-side display of help for arguments. My pet hate is that commands themselves cannot tell you things about them in a structured way. There's no reason why completion and --help are somehow separate from the execution itself. Love: context aware shell like zsh/oh-my-zsh provide. If I'm in a git project, show me a good git summary for example. If I'm in python venv, tell me about it. If I'm in some python project, extract its name from setup.py.
- joelthelion 10y agoIt should have a daemon to centralize things such as command history across multiple terminals.
- joelthelion 10y agoA modern protocol to communicate with the terminal would be nice.
- gue5t 10y agoDon't google errors. Don't network anything that isn't explicitly requested to be networked. Don't give any built-in affordances for HTTP or other poorly-designed, politically-imposed protocols. I don't even know what you're talking about with microservices, as that notion only makes sense in the context of implementation details of RPC services ("Cloud APIs" in 2016 parlance). A modern shell would: - Never use text as the interchange format, but rather keep binary representations in memory and link all commands in a given interaction into a single computation, doing inlining and optimization across the boundaries of what are currently separate processes communicating via pipes/IPC. - Know about the structure of valid invocations of commands (essentially, their type signature and the algebraic type structure of their parameters), preventing any "invalid invocation" error messages a priori. Only valid options would be permissible for tab-completion, and un-tab-completable options would give error feedback directly without executing the program. - Have a principled, data-race-free alternative to the filesystem for persistent storage of data, which maintains type information without preventing useful generic operations like bytewise encryption. - Support unicode as the only character set for text. - Encourage proportional fonts, so as to make box-drawing characters not work properly. An associated UI system would permits applications to refer neither to character cells nor pixels, but only to a graph of modifiable or immutable values and a set of presentation hints. Platform-specific modules would interpret these based on the capabilities of the local terminal. Full graphical applications over SSH are trivial under this model--no more "I use a shitty 1980's-era UI because that's the only thing I can export across the network consistently". - Allow addressing both local and remote system resources (RAM, CPUs, I/O devices) via a uniform interface, and allow dynamically attaching and detaching these from running processes, both local and remote. - From a more traditional shell perspective, it seems important to support "by" operations with good ergonomics. This is stuff like "sort all these files based on the output of applying this other file-accepting command to each" or "filter out all paragraphs in a text file containing the string 'foo', but only print the last seven characters of each one.". These would be a start.
- Koshkin 10y agoLooks like IPython Notebook is almost an ideal way to interact with a computer (as an information processing device, rather than, for example, a game machine).
- a3n 10y agoAgree. I think the plain ipython shell can go a long way now. It will pop up a graphic, and you can access the surrounding shell. In theory you can just live in ipython; I've tried it but I stumbled too much. Next on the spectrum would be the QT version of ipython. And then of course ipython notebook/jupyter. What really looks promising is the Jupyter Lab, currently in alpha. http://blog.jupyter.org/2016/07/14/jupyter-lab-alpha/ http://blog.jupyter.org/2016/07/14/jupyter-lab-alpha/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/jupyterlab https://pypi.python.org/pypi/jupyterlab
- shabble 10y agoipython shell is great for quick jobs, and is taking over a lot of what I used to do with long pipelines of cut/grep/perl -n, etc. Being able to grab some filenames/contents with foo = !ls bar = !cat *.txt # returns list of lines is super handy. And the real shell is always just C-z away, if I need it.
- dlitz 10y agoI'd like to see a good CLI design involving sandboxing-by-default, and handling object-capabilities (e.g. file descriptors) as first-class objects. Right now, "convert a.jpg b.png" passes the strings "a.jpg" and "b.png" to ImageMagick's convert command, but that command is free to open whatever files it wants, since there's no distinction between strings vs resources such as filenames, network sockets, etc. You can do this with pipes in simple cases, and bash has some support for this, but it's very primitive and the syntax is cumbersome.
- xwvvvvwx 10y agoBlack Screen has some pretty interesting ideas: https://github.com/shockone/black-screen https://github.com/shockone/black-screen
- danfrost 10y agoDo you know what the roadmap is for this? It looks like they want to build a terminal, but I can't see how it's significantly different from what we've got at the moment.
- y1426i 10y agoI find CLI a great interface. Its just stuck in pre web days! Here are some thoughts on its design / UX - - contextual help. if i write a command incorrect, it should suggest correction and link to more help. - cloud storage of all my command history - be more understanding. talk a bit in natural language. Eg. show my ip address -> translated to the right shell command. - learn and grow automatically as the community builds more tools. Like, hey used this command but check this one out! It is not feasible to upgrade all existing scripts to adhere to this but a wrapper shell that can provide this functionality should be very well possible.
- josh-wrale 10y agoI've tried using Elixir's iex as a login shell. It was an interesting experience. The pipelining in Elixir actually makes it feel a lot like bash. In Elixir, remote shell [1], autocomplete are built in. Strings are binary. Structs help structure output for human vs machine use (e.g. see HTTPoison.get("http://example.org" http://example.org") vs. HTTPoison.get!("http://example.org" http://example.org"). Processes are cheap. Functions are compostable. Rock on! http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/iex/IEx.html#module-remote-shells http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/iex/IEx.html#module-remot...
- ubuntourist 10y agoAlthough, through a long career, I've become accustomed to a wide variety of CLIs, I tend to agree: We've moved beyond 1999 a bit. The fact that a lot of these systems have legacy and tradition isn't sufficient. Languages like COBOL also have a long history. But now we have lots of other languages to choose from. First off, as much as possible, I'd eliminate non-words. I tutor a lot and people think perhaps I have a speech impediment the first time I say "grep". (Yes, I know, it's not technically part of the shell. But okay how about "fi" and "esac"? Really? Why not "enod" then?) I'd take command completion further: IDEs often have drop-downs and function signature descriptions as you move along coding. In a hypertext world with tooltips, etc, I think there's be a lot of room for those types of ideas. I do think the philosophy of "do one thing and one thing only, but do it well" is a good one. Piping stuff together is wonderful. I wonder if it would make sense and be shorter to explain in plain English, if the "water flowed the other way" instead. For example: "sort the output of the find result" = sort | find as opposed to: "take the output of find and sort it" = find | sort (That last bit was just a random thought of the moment, just trying to think a wee bit outside of the box.)
- saynsedit 10y agoIt wouldn't be enod, it would be rof
- abbasaamer 10y agoIt'd have the features of fish shell (https://fishshell.com https://fishshell.com) and would be able to pipe structured objects between programs like Windows Power Shell.
- nextweek2 10y agoMy biggest pet hate is the single tasking. Which is more to the nature of scripting languages. It would be great to have an event command queue. <rant> Each time I do a npm, apt-get, brew command it irks me that all the downloads happen then they unpack, then they process. Where really it should be put on an event command queue. That way downloads can continue whilst processing is happening. I have the same bug bear about the GUI, if I want to transcode a set of videos and move them to a NAS it's a linear process. I keep promising myself I should write a small app to get it done properly. I just wish the operating system was a little better at it. The main pain point is that if I send 10 files to my NAS it will transfer them all at the same time and take forever because of the seek time. What OS's should be doing is queuing up these things to make the transfer quicker. </rant>
- paulddraper 10y ago* `parallel` for scripting parallelism * `make` for scripting parallelism with dependencies
- jonsg 10y agoA good CLI has to satisfy a number of conditions, IMHO: * Human-friendly interaction: -- Command completion -- Help for all commands -- Doesn't need a load of APL-like runes in order to achieve anything -- Intuitively obvious, so far as possible -- Low bar for entry * Not too verbose (something that requires the equivalent of COBOL's "ADD A TO B GIVING C" ain't gonna roll, sorry!) * Sensible and consistent * Embeds a full programming language - but you don't need that language to run straightforward commands * Completely embraces parallelism without pain -- Including being able to spin off and manage daemon processes -- And having a painless way of managing (plumbing, in other words) inputs and outputs of each stage - {Uni,Linu}x shells haven't really improved the way they do this in over thirty years, and they didn't get it right the first time! * As much as possible of the operating system's capability should be exposed, to as deep a level as possible, through the CLI * Not tied to one operating system - inherently capable of being applied to any (or at least any common one) My preference would be that the CLI presents a genuinely object-oriented representation of data and the programs that know how to interpret the data, plus the operating system services as well. Microsoft's PowerShell satisfies a lot of these requirements...however, it falls way short of the "Low bar for entry" criterion, as anyone who's tried to learn it casually will have discovered the hard way. A Pythonic shell could also be made to work (yes, I've tried using Python as a shell. No, it didn't go well), but would require a bit of nurdling to bring it into compliance with most of the requirements above, particularly the human interface ones. A lot of questions here - a lot fewer answers, but I thought I'd throw out these thoughts for the assembled masses to contemplate, be inspired by, or tear to pieces.
- majkinetor 10y agoIt should look exactly like Powershell. Its simply a space ship compared to any other shell. Since it is comming to Linux you should start learning it now IMO. Xiki also had promiss. Unfortunatelly, it doesnt look like it will become mainstream.
- hellcat84 10y agoint main(int argl, byte* argb) For having just a byte* stream, not claiming this is a char, when I just have a byte of a char, and without terminating NUL character.
- kranner 10y agoI'd like to leave this cautionary tale against getting too clever from the Jargon File: Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'. In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete $ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported $ not found, assuming you meant 'delete '. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost. The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete $ twice.
- jhallenworld 10y agoHistory should be recorded in non-volatile storage immediately, not just on clean exits (can do this in bash, but it needs to be the default). You should be able to step though history for just arguments (can be done in bash, but needs to be easier). Take a look at TOPS-20: it had "question-mark help"- any time you hit ?, it told you what the next argument is for. The terminal emulator should have inline graphical output- it should not be text only. Someone should define a protocol so that you can have full graphical programs running in the terminal emulator. When you exit the program, the last view remains in the scroll-back history. Some plan9 things are good: network access should be in the filesystem so that you don't need special programs like wget: cp /net/www.google.com/http/index.html foo Same with local I/O: parameters for opening a serial port should be part of the filename when you open, something like: cp foo /dev/ttyS0:9600n81 The filesystem should be extended to also be a database. SQL is ugly, but some kind of relational algebra query language should be built in: cat /mydatabase/name="joe" is like 'select * from mydatabase where name="joe"'
- vasili111 10y agoIt should understand human language. Not commands, functions and etc, just plain human language.
- shabble 10y agoDown that road lies AppleScript... trying to do even trivial things in it has forced me into the alternative hell of 'scripting bridges' and using real languages, and ultimately giving up.
- flukus 10y agoI'd add an easy way for cli apps to expose bindings to be used from other apps. Working in a higher level language and having to rely on executing/parsing cli programs isn't pleasant.
- 55555 10y agoPlease build me an app that lets me search "prebuilt commands" from the command line itself. I am always opening Chrome to google "how to grep recursively only files of a certain type to find phone numbers"... why can't i just search that from the command line itself and then select from the outputted suggestions? Other than that, some random ideas..: Probable command completion. Possible arguments should be displayed as I type. Syntax highlighting and beautiful margins/padding Collapsible threads
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]