Could you elaborate on this? Do you mean user input more like natural language? I've seen a few attempts at this such as betty [1], but the reality of it is the input must still be translated into something the CLI understands, and as you might imagine it becomes difficult for more obscure options.
I didn't meant something so abrangent, I meant something simpler. For example, `ls`:
Instead of `ls -l`, `ls complete` or `ls with metadata`.
Instead of `ls -L`, `ls following symlinks`.
Instead of `ls -a`, `ls all` or `ls with all`.
I don't remember exactly what I was thinking.
It seems like you could get something like your examples by doing option aliases, so typing "complete" or "metadata" would be parsed as `-l`. However even something this simple starts to complicate parsing quite a bit (e.g. where are the option boundaries?) especially if you allow multiple tokens in an alias, like "with all" --> `-a`.
And at the end of the day, it just helps to learn through repetition. I have no idea what the "plant" means in `netstat -plant`, but I know it generates the output I want. Similarly it's much easier to type `ls -latr` than "ls complete all sort oldest first".
Just thinking about it.