Egregoros

cli tools not just walking me through it and instead having me ace the flags, is really just a niggerlicious holdover from the 80s and I don't care that I'm a noob and don't have 20000 hours grinding away at moldy ass system code.

it should be able to detect if you were running from cli or a shell script, and if it is the former, it should just tell you what it is gonna do if you hit enter, which is the default, and if you want something else just have a little wizard that assembles the command into a line at the bottom so then when you walked through the options, you have
>$ foo --flag-one 12 --flag-two /path/to/file ...
and so on and then you just hit enter and it runs it and you can copy-paste the command for later.

I really don't see what the problem is just doing it like that except it would take a bit of work to set up the wizard. if everything had wizard support though, you could make it be "$ wizard foo" though, instead of "$ man foo" and then it wouldn't really take that long to make one

RT: https://poa.st/objects/d58b406a-d72c-430b-8755-e6a35c5bae4d

@WandererUber i'm not really up to speed on generating autocomplete scripts, but maybe they'd get you 85% of the way there
feels like there has got to be an autocomplete for yt-dlp out there somewhere, path that bitch and see if it works?
i think most cli tools just want you to make your own shell scripts if you want to get froggy
i mean it's not a crazy idea, but we can't get peeps to settle on config file formats, an auto-generated logic tree for cli options will just cause total war and everybody gets killed

@JoshuaSlocum >an auto-generated logic tree for cli options will just cause total war and everybody gets killed
I know, that's what I'm saying. This is bad. We should instead do that. Get off my ass with your bs and just make the utility you provide as frictionless for the user as possible.
I'm not saying it should replace anything, I just think the default mode shouldn't be "either you remember all the flags and put them in the right format or I crash and tell you to read the man page"
it should be I run it and like in counter-strike I press 1 2 8 4 for my loadout. Like even tar's obtuse xyge options would work better than yt-dlp, is my point. Just give me options and let me learn them over time if I actually need them. It's insane to have a fucking MANUAL just to make a COMPUTER which is ten trillion times faster than I am, extract the audio from a youtube video. Just ASK me and do it, preferably while the video is already downloading but that's going too far

@WandererUber i mean, that's a fine idea as far as it goes, but linux cli tools historically are loathe to fiddle with things because some bit of perl script that is currently keeping the world financial markets from imploding depends on the options being stable
IIRC homebrew does a lot of these things and tosses them in /etc/bash_completions.d or something like that
(i don't use homebrew anymore because in the past it made such a goddamn mess of things i had to exorcise my mac and now i'm gunshy)
in any event any wish that this glorious future will come to pass is for naught because people will just ask an LLM to spit out whatever command is needed and that'll be the Done Thing until the sun burns out

@WandererUber interestingly (well, interesting to me anyway), i've been teaching teenagers how to navigate the command line
i understand the frustration as well as anybody could
but as i told the kids who more or less ask the same questions you're asking, developer time is a zero sum game
have you ever looked into how a man page is made? there are tools to make it simpler, but even so, groff is like it's own DSL
for pretty much all commandline tools, the man page is the single source of truth outside of reading the source
if you're going to ask the developers to also generate something on top of that, man, that's not going to happen
spend some of your own precious time and come up with an interactive shell script wrapper for yt-dlp and see how easy (or not) it is to do so, maybe you'll get an idea of the complexity of this
for that matter, bone up on some tcl/tk and make a gui version, that's kind of tcl/tk's raison d'etre, and tcl is pretty simple

@WWIII_ENJOYER @JoshuaSlocum it's really water upon my mill that writing a man page is also its own huge thing, because basically all I'm proposing is an interactive man page, or at least have some pages of the manual be interactive and walk you through the common options.
You're not discussing the utility, you're not discussing if it is "the way" to do it, you're not even explaining why what I am talking about would be comparatively hard. In the end you just want to signal that you are an expert. Which is especially stupid because I never even said it was easy or was naive about it. But apparently is/ought goes over your head. very silly. Let's just have an actual discussion about it, like Joshua and I did.

@WandererUber @WWIII_ENJOYER >it's really water upon my mill that writing a man page is also its own huge thing
well, not really
it is done that way for historical reasons, and changing it in a substantial way has not yet proved worth the trouble
(see: GNU's info pages not doing much of anything at all outside of GNU tools)
the basics of your idea isn't particularly new, OpenDoc, CORBA, OLE are at their core a version of this sort of thing, and none of them caught on
partially because "oh God, not another thing", but also because the complexity of this sort of thing grows exponentially and turns into a mess quite quickly
the history of computing is bad ideas getting baked in "because compatibility", but nobody complains too much so long as the unix "do one thing, use text streams for I/O, never bathe" way is followed

@JoshuaSlocum @WWIII_ENJOYER The point is that building man page is not "the easy thing" and what I said "the hard thing", that's what's water upon my mill. They're already investing a ton of time into it, just into something, that was my initial claim, is inferior.

please don't explain to me why it is the way it is. I know that.

>OpenDoc, CORBA, OLE
not at all what I am talking about
Bro thinks about some weird architecture changes when all I want is a literal wizard so I can learn the tar flags on the go. Why are the simplest things the hardest to explain?

@WandererUber @WWIII_ENJOYER i understand what you're saying, and i'm giving several examples to explain why it's a) not practical, b) difficult even if it was practical, and c) unlikely to make much headway
i think your incessant need to find conflict where there is none is getting in your way
but i'll try once more
if you read any man page for a sufficiently complex tool, you'll find something that says "this switch has no effect when this is called with this other switch", or "this switch does not work unless you also declare a file path"
it's full of these things, and the current way to handle user failure to use the tool correctly is to throw an error
that is (2) places where these cases are handled, explaining what you need to do and handling what happens if you do it wrong
those are not going away, but now you want to add... something, i'm not entirely sure what, but i imagine it as tab-completion, which will add a third place to put this information, with all the concomitant tests needed
i'm not sure how else to put it other than this is difficult
if you want to say "it should have been done better," well, yeah, and we should have picked our own cotton too, that's done now
fwiw, there is nothing stopping you from writing a new tool that will divine exactly what you want from the man page
call it "magicnigger"
you type "magicnigger tar" and then start tabbing
it will do whatever magic you can invent by sorting through the man page and offering options, with the accompanying text
you will go mad at some point, but there it is
btw, a lot of tools have some version of what you're talking about, "command help <whatever switch or option you want to know>"
it's not interactive as you're talking about, but it's there
but complaining about how all those programmers did all this work and they didn't do it to your liking and they're stupid because of that is pretty nigger tbh

@JoshuaSlocum @WWIII_ENJOYER you keep going off into the woods and that is why I think you still DON'T understand what little I even was proposing, actually.
But you can continue to talk about the intricacies of complex cli tooling when literally all I wanted is not have to remember what the silly flag is called for the most common operation of a small tool, nothing 100% nothing that covers weird edge cases on IBM mainframes from the 90s or what have you, just something that covers the basics.
If I want something custom, I need to read the manual. I know that.
If I go to youtube, I don't have to read the manual to know how to search. Imagine if websites worked like CLI tools. If you didn't go to youtube.com/search?q=foo then it wouldn't do it.
That is stupid. If I need the most common functionality of a cli tool, it can just open, I hit 3 for "3. Audio extraction, as mp3" and it prints all the flags, does it, is done.

@JoshuaSlocum @WWIII_ENJOYER I do. You just don't understand it because you think it's good for some reason to remember the flags and input them manually. I don't understand why you think this, but you do. It was literally just a small little annoyance that I felt like talking about, but all you experts kept jerking each other off about how it's "junior" to say this. Which it isn't. Because it's not a huge change that would require tons of hours or something computationally unusable, just a small UX improvement.

@James_Dixon @JoshuaSlocum @WWIII_ENJOYER >is completely incapable of reading this thread
>tells me to read the man pages for everything
some irony.
This already exists. it's called a bash script wrapped around the tool. My point was not that it doesn't exist, and what I meant by "not a huge change" is that I was not thinking about these weird interop architectures, but rather a bit of hacking, which would be even less painful if universalized, i.e. if there was a wizard subroutine in man.
"imagine if this was the default. it would save some time." there really is nothing complex about this. Do I need the crayons or can you actually follow me here, grandpa?