if you are doing it often that's true. But for people like me who do it once every month or two it really is hard to memorize, especially if it's not exactly the same task.
What I would love would be an interactive script that asked me what I was trying to do and constructed a command line for me while explaining what it would do and the meaning of each argument. And of course it should favour commands that do not re-encode where possible.
I swear I want this as a general tool for all command-line tools.
Start the tool, and just list all of the options in order of usage popularity to toggle on as desired, with a brief explanation, and a field to paste in arguments like filenames or values when needed. If an option is commonly used with another (or requires it), provide those hints (or automatically add the necessary values). If a value itself has structure (e.g. is itself a shell command), drill down recursively. Ensure that quotes and spaces and special characters always get escaped correctly.
In other words, a general-purpose command-line builder. And while we're at it, be able to save particular "templates" for fast re-use, identifying which values should be editable in the future.
I can't be the first person to think of this, but I've never come across anything like it and don't understand why not. It doesn't require AI or anything. Maybe it's the difficulty involved in creating the metadata for each tool, since man pages aren't machine-readable. But maybe that's where AI can help -- not in the tool itself, but to create the initial database of tool options, that can then be maintained by hand?
(Navi [1] does the templating part, but not the "interactive builder" part.)
Indeed why not have —tui option and some basic menu? Even a simplified scripting with reasonable API would be better.
I find myself bothering exactly zero times to memorise this obnoxiously long command line. Claude fills in, and I can explore features better. What’s not to like? That I’m getting dumber for not memorising pages of cli args?
Love the project, but as with every Swiss knife this conversation is a thing and relevant. We had similar one reg JQ syntax and I’m truly convinced JQ is wonderful and useful tool. But I’m not gonna bother learning more DSLs…
if you are doing it often that's true. But for people like me who do it once every month or two it really is hard to memorize, especially if it's not exactly the same task.
What I would love would be an interactive script that asked me what I was trying to do and constructed a command line for me while explaining what it would do and the meaning of each argument. And of course it should favour commands that do not re-encode where possible.