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

Receiving the input and user interaction

The primary methods for receiving input via a command-line application are through its subcommands, arguments, and options, also known as flags. However, additional input can come in the form of stdin, signals, and control characters. In this section, we’ll break down each different input type and when and how to interact with the user.

Defining subcommands, arguments, and flags

Before we start characterizing the main types of input, let’s reiterate the structural pattern that explains the generalized location for each input type in terms of its predictability and familiarity. There’s an excellent description of the pattern within the Cobra Framework documentation. This is one of the best explanations because it compares the structure to natural language and, just like speaking and writing, the syntax needs to be properly interpreted:

APPNAME NOUN VERB –ADJECTIVE

Note

The argument is the noun and the...