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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned some specific points to consider when building for a machine versus a human. Machines like simple text and have certain expectations of the data that is returned from other applications. Machine output can sometimes break usability. Designing for humans first, we talked about how we can easily switch to machine-friendly output when needed with the use of some popular flags: --json, --plain, and --silence.

Much goes into a usable design, and we went over some of the ways you can increase the usability of your CLI—from using color with intention, outputting data in tables, paging through long text, and being consistent. All of the aforementioned elements will help the user feel more comfortable and guided when using your CLI, which is one of the main goals we want to achieve. We can summarize with a quick table what a good CLI design looks like versus a bad CLI design:

Figure 8.5 – Good versus bad CLI design

Figure 8.5 – Good versus bad CLI design...