How to build useful, empathic and robust CLI tools
Written by Stefan Judis
- Published at
- Updated at
- Reading time
- 1min
I love well-crafted CLI tooling. Multiple colors, space formatting, creative spinners, some emojis... I'm all in for these things. And while I enjoy these tiny details, there is so much more to consider when building a CLI interface.
- When should you use
stdoutorstderr? - Which standard CLI parameters should you use?
- How do you write an excellent help dialog?
The Command Line Interface Guidelines answer the above and many other questions. They are a beautiful guide on commonly used CLI best practices that's worth bookmarking.
So, if you're building a CLI tool, check the included recommendations! I promise they will make your tool more useable and more delightful to use!
Was this post helpful?
Yes? Cool! You might want to check out Web Weekly for more WebDev shenanigans. The last edition went out 18 days ago.
Yes? Cool! You might want to check out Web Weekly for more WebDev shenanigans. The last edition went out 18 days ago.
Related Topics
Related Articles
- Make a PDF look like it was manually scanned
- Git-based dotfile management without symlinks
- How to flip characters and words in your terminal
- A native shell alternative to the trash-cli
- Suffix aliases (-s) in Zsh
About the author
Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, Tiny helpers maintainer, and DevRel at Checkly.