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I don't agree about discoverability. The great thing about command line tools are man pages. You have a reasonably consistent form of documentation across dif
by 7952 9y ago
I don't agree about discoverability. The great thing about command line tools are man pages. You have a reasonably consistent form of documentation across different tools. And the options are invoked in the same way. In comparison with UI tools you have to navigate menus and options which is hard for unfamiliar software. And the documentation always has to explain UI steps rather than just the options. For command line I can easily search and scan man pages to get a complete view of what the software does.
- citrin_ru 9y agoInstead of one big GUI app in CLI you often supposed to use combination of smaller tools. When you know which tools you need you can read man pages for them. But it is not easy to discover which tool you need. Especially in Linux where you need install it first. Other problem: man pages are too long to read because modern CLI tools are cluttered with lots of rarely used options. I wish developers followed Unix way [1], but trend goes in the opposite direction. [1] http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf