Show HN: Notational `ls` - Never get lost in code again (hour long hack)

Re:Show HN: Notational `ls` - Never get lost in code again (... by wisty on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:27AM (#2964273)

There's a lot of UNIX tools which are user-unfriendly, simply because they were designed not to be chatty. You can't use nls to pump a list of files into another script, which then uses the list of files to do something else useful. Chatty scripts can't be chained together.

Yet, controlling chatty output is something that is already done, with -v (verbosity) levels.

I wonder how much more usable UNIX would be, if -v was on by default, and there was some easy way to disable it when chaining tools.

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Re:Show HN: Notational `ls` - Never get lost in code again (... by _delirium on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @06:10AM (#2964945)

Some distros do experiment with that, since it's relatively easy to ship some default aliases. For example, ls is often aliased to some combination of --color, -l, and -h.

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Re:Show HN: Notational `ls` - Never get lost in code again (... by drivebyacct2 on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:31AM (#2964289)

Usually `-v` is used to increase verbosity in traditional unix applications (ls, mv, cp, etc). Or maybe I'm missing your point.

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Re:Show HN: Notational `ls` - Never get lost in code again (... by wisty on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:59AM (#2964352)

Corrected - "increase" -> "control".

My point is, UNIX tools are designed to be easy to use by the expert (easy to chain), but hard for beginners (not chatty).

There's also a lot of neglect towards giving users useful feedback, because feedback just doesn't happen by default, so why improve it?

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