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

Building for Humans versus Machines

Thinking about your end user while you develop your command-line application will make you a more empathic developer. Consider not just how you feel about the way certain command-line interfaces (CLIs) behave but also how you could improve the experience for yourself and others. Much goes into usability and it’s not possible to cram it all into a single chapter, so we suggest following up with the suggested article and book in the Further reading section.

One of the first points to consider when building your command-line interface is that while it will be primarily used by humans, it can also be called within scripts, and the output from your program could be used as input into another application, such as grep or awk. Within this chapter, we’ll go over how to build for both and how to tell when you’re outputting to one versus the other.

The second point is the use of ASCII art to increase information density. Whether...