4 ms·

Designing for the Command Line

15 points by fmerian 4y ago

cxr 4y ago
I really dislike these kinds of utilities—inescapable `--verbose` mode with superfluous color, animations, and other distractions. It's your prerogative to make something that looks neat, but please limit it to an opt-in for the types of people who already spend their free time installing Vim plugins and tweaking their shell. For everyone else, take a cue from the design of standard Unix utilities and allow the default experience to be less chaotic; output nothing on success, and on failure, a simple descriptive message. Otherwise, no throbbers, no vaporwave aesthetics, no terminal graphics—just a record that a simple dialog on a simulated teletype has taken place.
- anitil 4y ago
  What's your opinion of detecting if output is a tty vs a pipe and adjusting accordingly? 'ls' does this I believe as does 'jq' (much to my irritation)
  - dllthomas 4y ago
    FWIW I like this, but you should absolutely provide options to override (in both directions).
bediger4000 4y ago
> Welcome to the terminal, the 90’s interface Pretty sure a plain terminal interface was available well before the 90s. Kids these days...
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  Not just that… “on the first computers.” The 1990s, age of the first computers.
junon 4y ago
Mrh. I maintain chalk. Moving in this direction is not what I'd like to see, personally. This sort of design has a lot of foot guns in the CLI as we know it today.
margarina72 4y ago
It seems like a set of very opinionated visual design choices. For cli design guideline, I really liked https://clig.dev/ https://clig.dev/ which is actually about UX for the cli, and not about the eye candy. Other than that, the general idea of the startup / product it is linked to is pretty cool (i.e design guidelines in code with integration with figma and all) but it is also a no-go as it's a closed source saas company, which mean all your design specs go to hell the day the company dies/is acquired.

4 ms·

Designing for the Command Line

15 points by fmerian 4y ago

cxr 4y ago
I really dislike these kinds of utilities—inescapable `--verbose` mode with superfluous color, animations, and other distractions. It's your prerogative to make something that looks neat, but please limit it to an opt-in for the types of people who already spend their free time installing Vim plugins and tweaking their shell. For everyone else, take a cue from the design of standard Unix utilities and allow the default experience to be less chaotic; output nothing on success, and on failure, a simple descriptive message. Otherwise, no throbbers, no vaporwave aesthetics, no terminal graphics—just a record that a simple dialog on a simulated teletype has taken place.
- anitil 4y ago
  What's your opinion of detecting if output is a tty vs a pipe and adjusting accordingly? 'ls' does this I believe as does 'jq' (much to my irritation)
  - dllthomas 4y ago
    FWIW I like this, but you should absolutely provide options to override (in both directions).
bediger4000 4y ago
> Welcome to the terminal, the 90’s interface Pretty sure a plain terminal interface was available well before the 90s. Kids these days...
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  Not just that… “on the first computers.” The 1990s, age of the first computers.
junon 4y ago
Mrh. I maintain chalk. Moving in this direction is not what I'd like to see, personally. This sort of design has a lot of foot guns in the CLI as we know it today.
margarina72 4y ago
It seems like a set of very opinionated visual design choices. For cli design guideline, I really liked https://clig.dev/ https://clig.dev/ which is actually about UX for the cli, and not about the eye candy. Other than that, the general idea of the startup / product it is linked to is pretty cool (i.e design guidelines in code with integration with figma and all) but it is also a no-go as it's a closed source saas company, which mean all your design specs go to hell the day the company dies/is acquired.