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

Being consistent across CLIs

Learning about command-line syntax, flags, and environment variables requires an upfront cost that pays off in the long run with efficiency if programs are consistent across the board. For example, terminal conventions are ingrained into our fingertips. Reusing these conventions by following preexisting patterns helps to make a CLI more intuitive and guessable. This is what makes users efficient.

There are times when preexisting patterns break usability. As mentioned earlier, a lot of Unix commands don’t return any output by default, which can cause confusion for people who are new to using the terminal or CLI. In this case, it’s fine to break the pattern for the benefit of increased usability.

There are specific topics to consider when maintaining consistency with the larger community of CLIs, but also within the application itself:

  • Naming
  • Positional versus flag arguments
  • Flag naming
  • Usage

Naming

Use consistent...