CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programs
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderHello HN! We’re Ben, Aanand, Carl, Eva, and Mark, and we made the Command Line Interface Guidelines. Earlier this year, I was working on the Replicate CLI [0]. I had previously worked on Docker so I had a bunch of accumulated knowledge about what makes a good CLI, but I wanted to make Replicate really good, so I looked for some design guides or best practices. Turns out, nothing substantial had been published since the 1980s. On this search I…
> Most people today don’t know what the command line is, much less why they would want to bother with it. This is true today, and it was true as well "in the 1980s", to use the same time frame as TFA. The difference is that today there are more people than ever who know what the command line is, and who can use it. At least an order of magnitude more people; maybe two. We can certainly say that…
This is actually nice and useful resource for command line UX.
> Don’t bother with man pages. We believe that if you’re following these guidelines for help and documentation, you won’t need man pages. I disagree strongly in all but exceptional cases. These exceptions would still benefit from a bare-bones man page with the most common options and a handful of examples of common usage.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 1007
- Total comments
- 422
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-12-04 | CLI Guidelines | todsacerdoti | 4 | 0 |
| 2020-12-04 | CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programsFirst breakout · Best thread | bfirsh | 564 | 212 |
| 2020-12-21 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | gmays | 19 | 5 |
| 2022-04-30 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | kyleShropshire | 5 | 0 |
| 2022-06-07 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | mmazzarolo | 61 | 1 |
| 2022-11-25 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | justanotherdot | 2 | 0 |
| 2023-10-28 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | pizza | 2 | 1 |
| 2023-11-07 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | aphrax | 2 | 0 |
| 2024-02-06 | Command line interface guidelines (2021)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | petercooper | 341 | 201 |
| 2025-09-19 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | NullCascade | 3 | 1 |
| 2025-11-05 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | mooreds | 3 | 0 |
| 2025-12-25 | Command Line Interface Guidelines | vinhnx | 1 | 1 |