6 ms·

Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their

Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their words) help output. I'd much rather simple plain text output that looks like all the other tools I already use.

assbuttbuttass 1y ago
agreed, plain text is more scriptable too. Let me pipe it into awk!
- caarlos0 1y ago
  If you do it right, you can output plain text when stdout is not a tty - which is something fang does, fwiw :)
  - arp242 1y ago
    It still tries to put the terminal in raw mode or something. "cmd | less" doesn't work and requires "stty sane". I didn't investigate, but FYI.
- kitd 1y ago
  A lot of the fancy CLIs I use have a `--json` option that gives the user the chance to pipe output to eg jq and process it there. I find that a good alternative to running stuff through cut, sed or awk before processing.
arp242 1y ago
Alignment (and maybe bold text for some things) is all you need in >95% of cases, IMHO. One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely. For example, here's a comparison of this fang library vs one where I just raw-dogged the usage text: https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD – the nice alignment does a lot more than colours. Especially for larger programs with a bunch of flags it can be such a pain. For example from an otherwise quite nice tool: https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk – you just completely lose any "overview". I did spend some time on some better tooling to improve all of this, because manually writing these isn't super-fun either, but not so straight-forward to do well (or at least: not in a way that I like).
- quotemstr 1y ago
  > One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely. Bling is easy. Unsexy usability details are hard. Z$ time ./example/run You ran the root command. Now try --help. ./example/run 0.13s user 0.27s system 177% cpu 0.228 total Why would an example program take 228ms? Z$ ./example/run --name='abc def' Unknown command "def" for "example". Try --help for usage. Huh? 'abc def' is one shell word. --name=abc works fine. Z$ ./example/run --name '' ERROR Flag needs an argument: --name. Try --help for usage. But I did give it an argument: the empty string. And why is the output indented two columns from the left margin anyway? Z$ ./example/run '' You ran the root command. Now try --help. Z$ ./example/run 'x' ERROR Unknown command "x" for "example". Try --help for usage. Should have produced an error using '' for the subcommand name. Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" Ran the sub command! Z$ ./example/run --help A little example program! It doesn’t really do anything, but that’s the point.™ USAGE example [command] [args] [--flags] EXAMPLES # Run it: example # Run it with some arguments: example --name=Carlos -a -s Becker -a # Run a subcommand with an argument: example sub --async --foo=xyz --async arguments # Run with a quoted string: example sub "quoted string" # Mix and match: example sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" COMMANDS help [command] Help about any command sub [command] [args] [--flags] An example subcommand throw Throws an error FLAGS -a --async Run async -h --help Help for example --name Your name (jane) -s --surname Your surname (doe) -v --version Version for example Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" zsh: command not found: example sub multi-word quoted string --flag another quoted string Huh? Why did the command work when I typed it myself but not when I pasted from the help output? Oh. Because the help output is using nbsp, not regular spaces. Anyway, command line interfaces have a surprising number of hairy corner cases. I'd rather have boring monochrome that gets them right than an all-colorful theme auto-shell-completion-generating system that doesn't.
anitil 1y ago
I like colour in a tool like 'bat' or 'jless' where it helps me visually scan, but other than that I'd agree with you
quotemstr 1y ago
> overly pretty "bling" is the word you're looking for. It's just a fashion. Fashion is famously cyclic, and we're just in a high-ornamentation part of the cycle. Eventually, restraint will become fashionable again.
guappa 1y ago
And they often don't check the terminal so if you pipe them or run on a serial terminal they break horribly.
joshka 1y ago
As a counter argument, not putting color in help usage text leaves a large amount on the table for readability. The reasonable compromise for those that disagree with this is to set the NO_COLOR environment variable. This should be respected by most things which do use color (and if it's not, that's a bug).

assbuttbuttass 1y ago

agreed, plain text is more scriptable too. Let me pipe it into awk!

caarlos0 1y ago
If you do it right, you can output plain text when stdout is not a tty - which is something fang does, fwiw :)
- arp242 1y ago
  It still tries to put the terminal in raw mode or something. "cmd | less" doesn't work and requires "stty sane". I didn't investigate, but FYI.
kitd 1y ago
A lot of the fancy CLIs I use have a `--json` option that gives the user the chance to pipe output to eg jq and process it there. I find that a good alternative to running stuff through cut, sed or awk before processing.

arp242 1y ago

Alignment (and maybe bold text for some things) is all you need in >95% of cases, IMHO. One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely. For example, here's a comparison of this fang library vs one where I just raw-dogged the usage text: https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD – the nice alignment does a lot more than colours. Especially for larger programs with a bunch of flags it can be such a pain. For example from an otherwise quite nice tool: https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk – you just completely lose any "overview". I did spend some time on some better tooling to improve all of this, because manually writing these isn't super-fun either, but not so straight-forward to do well (or at least: not in a way that I like).

quotemstr 1y ago
> One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely. Bling is easy. Unsexy usability details are hard. Z$ time ./example/run You ran the root command. Now try --help. ./example/run 0.13s user 0.27s system 177% cpu 0.228 total Why would an example program take 228ms? Z$ ./example/run --name='abc def' Unknown command "def" for "example". Try --help for usage. Huh? 'abc def' is one shell word. --name=abc works fine. Z$ ./example/run --name '' ERROR Flag needs an argument: --name. Try --help for usage. But I did give it an argument: the empty string. And why is the output indented two columns from the left margin anyway? Z$ ./example/run '' You ran the root command. Now try --help. Z$ ./example/run 'x' ERROR Unknown command "x" for "example". Try --help for usage. Should have produced an error using '' for the subcommand name. Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" Ran the sub command! Z$ ./example/run --help A little example program! It doesn’t really do anything, but that’s the point.™ USAGE example [command] [args] [--flags] EXAMPLES # Run it: example # Run it with some arguments: example --name=Carlos -a -s Becker -a # Run a subcommand with an argument: example sub --async --foo=xyz --async arguments # Run with a quoted string: example sub "quoted string" # Mix and match: example sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" COMMANDS help [command] Help about any command sub [command] [args] [--flags] An example subcommand throw Throws an error FLAGS -a --async Run async -h --help Help for example --name Your name (jane) -s --surname Your surname (doe) -v --version Version for example Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string" zsh: command not found: example sub multi-word quoted string --flag another quoted string Huh? Why did the command work when I typed it myself but not when I pasted from the help output? Oh. Because the help output is using nbsp, not regular spaces. Anyway, command line interfaces have a surprising number of hairy corner cases. I'd rather have boring monochrome that gets them right than an all-colorful theme auto-shell-completion-generating system that doesn't.

anitil 1y ago

I like colour in a tool like 'bat' or 'jless' where it helps me visually scan, but other than that I'd agree with you

quotemstr 1y ago

> overly pretty "bling" is the word you're looking for. It's just a fashion. Fashion is famously cyclic, and we're just in a high-ornamentation part of the cycle. Eventually, restraint will become fashionable again.

guappa 1y ago

And they often don't check the terminal so if you pipe them or run on a serial terminal they break horribly.

joshka 1y ago

As a counter argument, not putting color in help usage text leaves a large amount on the table for readability. The reasonable compromise for those that disagree with this is to set the NO_COLOR environment variable. This should be respected by most things which do use color (and if it's not, that's a bug).