3 Commandments for CLI Design

3 years ago puppet.com

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photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain) In Neal Stephenson’s 1999 essay https://web.archive.org/web/20180218045352/http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html, he describes how using Command-Line Interface (CLI) utilities is simpler and requires less code than a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

The best of these enable power users while retaining the user interaction paradigms that make the small tools great.

Go Upscale, Intelligently — the best tools infer the context they’re running in take advantage of modern capabilities if they can.

And no modern tool that outputs a lot of records in a table ought to be without a json output option.

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