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