--- title: "Best practices for inclusive CLIs" description: "A response to some problematic CLI UX advice, with alternative recommendations for designing more accessible CLI utilities." date: 2022-06-10T19:24:54-07:00 replyURI: "https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/06/01/ux-patterns-cli-tools.html" replyTitle: "UX patterns for CLI tools" replyType: "BlogPosting" replyAuthor: "Lucas F. Costa" replyAuthorURI: "https://lucasfcosta.com/" evergreen: true tags: - accessibility outputs: - html --- This began as a reply to another article by Lucas F. Costa; it lists practices to improve user-experience (UX) of command-line interfaces (CLIs). It comes from a good place, and has some good advice: I particularly like its advice on input-validation and understandable errors. Unfortunately, a number of its suggestions are problematic, particularly from an accessibility perspective.
Note: this article specifically concerns CLIs, not full-blown textual user interfaces (TUIs). It also focuses on utilities for UNIX-like shells; other command-line environments may have different conventions.
Problematic patterns -------------------- The "Getting Started Experience" section of Lucas' article has a GIF video of a CLI utility printing `--help` output, featuring a decorative border. {{{{
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