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Ask HN: Great CLI interfaces / Command-K

by jdwyah on 2/15/24, 1:02 PM with 3 comments

CLI are nice, but tools like Linear have got me accustomed to typing command-k and then autocompleting my way to success.

We just updated ours to be much more interactive and while we've kept the standard CLI argument behavior, I have fully converted and don't see myself going back anytime soon.

Basically it meant taking common option sets and adding a descriptions that make them more discoverable, then letting you search. eg

$ cli ? What would you like to do? c create Create a new config create --env-var Create an ENV Var provided item with --env-var create --secret Create a new secret in Prefab with --secret

Then being flexible enough to collect the other pieces of information it needs afterwards (what environment would you like to set the secret in / etc)

Are there any CLIs that use this pattern particularly successfully? I'd love to see how far we can take this.

  • by nicbou on 2/17/24, 3:43 AM

    I usually use K-bars for known tasks. Sublime Text's bar is the one I use the most by far. I like that it matches abbreviations, and bits that are not at the start of the command. It also has different kinds of bars to call projects, files and commands. Sublime Merge has the same feature.

    I wouldn't like an LLM version because the delay would negate the benefits of such an interface. It's currently absurdly fast for me to use this bar to do stuff. The response time matters a lot.

  • by jdwyah on 2/15/24, 1:21 PM

    Also: how interesting will it be to leverage local LLM with the CLI. Any good examples of this yet?