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 have learned specific steps to make your command-line application more empathetic. From error handling, debug and traceback information, effortless bug submission, and empathic advocacy in technical communication, you have learned the technical and empathic skills to apply within your application.

Errors can now be rewritten in color to jump out of the screen and decorated with additional information that provides the user information on exactly where an error has occurred and potentially what they may need to do to reach a resolution. When an error seems unresolvable, the user can then run the same command using the --verbose flag and view the detail logs, which might contain server requests and responses necessary to trace more specifically where an error may be happening, down to the line of code.

If a bug is encountered, the addition of a new bug command allows the user to spawn a new browser straight from their terminal, opening straight to a...