Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By : Marian Montagnino
Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By: Marian Montagnino

Overview of this book

Although graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are intuitive and user-friendly, nothing beats a command-line interface (CLI) when it comes to productivity. Many organizations settle for a GUI without searching for alternatives that offer better accessibility and functionality. If this describes your organization, then pick up this book and get them to rethink that decision. Building Modern CLI Applications in Go will help you achieve an interface that rivals a GUI in elegance yet surpasses it in high-performance execution. Through its practical, step-by-step approach, you’ll learn everything you need to harness the power and simplicity of the Go language to build CLI applications that revolutionize the way you work. After a primer on CLI standards and Go, you’ll be launched into tool design and proper framework use for true development proficiency. The book then moves on to all things CLI, helping you master everything from arguments and flags to errors and API calls. Later, you’ll dive into the nuances of empathic development so that you can ensure the best UX possible, before you finish up with build tags, cross-compilation, and container-based distribution. By the end of this UX book, you’ll be fully equipped to take the performance and flexibility of your organization’s applications to the next level.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with a Solid Foundation
6
Part 2: The Ins and Outs of a CLI
10
Part 3: Interactivity and Empathic Driven Design
14
Part 4: Building and Distributing for Different Platforms

Part 3: Interactivity and Empathic Driven Design

This part is about how to develop a more user-friendly command-line interface (CLI) by considering the end user’s perspective. It covers topics such as building for humans versus machines, using ASCII art to improve information density, and ensuring consistency in flag names and arguments. The section also emphasizes the importance of empathy in CLI development, including rewriting errors in a user-friendly way, providing detailed logging, and creating man pages and usage examples. Additionally, the benefits of interactivity through prompts and terminal dashboards are discussed, with examples of how to build user prompts and dashboards using the Termdash library.

This part has the following chapters:

  • Chapter 8, Building for Humans Versus Machines
  • Chapter 9, The Empathic Side of Development
  • Chapter 10, Interactivity with Prompts and Terminal Dashboards