CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programs

Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by alpaca128 on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:04AM (#25313578)

Icons in GUIs are commonly used for interactive elements. Most CLI tools are not interactive, they just produce some output and the user expects that output to be easy to parse and compatible with as many terminals as possible.

You can easily output tables, bullet lists and many other things just with basic symbols supported everywhere. If your CLI program requires installing fontawesome or breaks in a terminal multiplexer etc. I'm probably not going to use it.

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Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by brabel on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:19PM (#25319401)

Emojis are part of unicode. No need for font awesome to support emojis.

Visit https://emojipedia.org and notice how all emojis have their own code point :)

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Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by alpaca128 on Monday December 07, 2020 @10:57AM (#25333363)

I merely mentioned fontawesome as one of many possible examples. And as already said, a symbol having its place in unicode does not mean it is available on the computer or in a certain program. For example, in Linux terminals it's not uncommon that at least one optional font installation is required in order to get various emoji to display correctly, let alone other non-western symbols.

Many people use the terminal exactly because it displays fewer kinds of content than e.g. a web browser, which as a side effect simplifies many situations.

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Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by account42 on Monday December 07, 2020 @07:03AM (#25331354)

Being part of Unicode does not preclude having to install additional fonts.

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