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...