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

Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by scbrg on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:39AM (#25313788)

Personally, I don't. I quite like things to be text, because text can be understood. Icons can be... learned, I suppose, but then they tend to be inconsistent between apps and even change depending on themes and whatnot - so in general, it's mostly like playing a game of Memory where someone keeps shuffling the pieces.

But the main reason not to use emojis would be that you have no idea how they'll look to the user. I tried to paste the example output from yubikey-agent into my terminal, and all I got was a bunch of differently sized squares. Very informative...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by brabel on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:16PM (#25319383)

You should try to configure your terminal to use UTF-8.

Symbols are universally used for quickly warning/informing in the real world and if done well, are very intuitive. Ignoring them in the digital world would be going against human UX (but no one ignores them, of course, even very old CLis already used them, but with the widespread use of UTF-8 and Emojis with that, it just became much easier and better).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command... by scbrg on Sunday December 06, 2020 @11:09AM (#25324367)

My terminal has been configured to use UTF-8 for nearly twenty years. Apparently I do not have any font with these glyphs installed though, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect that people do.

[ Parent | on HN ]