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Ask HN: What are the principles of information design for CLI output?
I have been searching for broad discussions of the patterns, anti-patterns and best-practices for presenting information (both text and data) for human consumption via stdout (or, I suppose, in flat log-files), but have had no luck. For reference, I found plenty on designing the commands/syntax themselves.
Interested in existing online or print resources on the topic if they exist, though introspective why-focused first-hand knowledge may be essential if these resources really don't exist.
- valarauca1 12y agoThe Art of Unix Programming (Eric S Raymond, various editions) talks a lot about how to simply interface with the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, etc. I'm not exactly sure if that's what you are looking for?
- abathur 12y agoIt will be hard to say until I take a look; thanks in any case for the recommendation. It's hard to speak specifically, because I'm interested in a broad array of design decisions per how you present information to the user. Examples of these decisions might be: how you decide what is an acceptable information density, how you decide whether to reduce or increase the space you're giving tabular elements, how to help the user track long lines, how and where to position information a mix of critical and non-critical information (where the non-critical information is still necessary for interpreting the critical data). Perhaps that helps?
- valarauca1 12y agoI don't think any real studies have been done on this, or any real comprehensive information. Its more played fast and loose by developers primarily by just copying what other people did before them that they liked. Really the terminal output isn't a place people look for inspired design, just give me the information I want and keep going.
- abathur 12y agoThe best resource thus far may be "The Art of Unix Usability" by Eric S Raymond which can be found at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ and was coincidentally posted by user diggan at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591072 shortly before I made this post. Hopefully including this here will help some future googler.
- abathur 12y agoHaving now read most of this and skimmed the rest, it was less useful than I initially hoped; the principles themselves were useful but the book itself is focused on GUI design for Unix.