Just discovered Derick Schaefer’s book CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces
Once the backbone of early computing, the command-line interface (CLI) nearly disappeared in the shadow of graphical user interfaces. But today, it’s experiencing a powerful resurgence—driven by DevOps, automation, cloud-native infrastructure, and the rise of generative AI. While its roots trace back to the 1960s, the CLI has evolved into a modern development essential: fast, scriptable, cross-platform, and precise.
…
This book is a modern guide to command-line development, written for engineers, architects, and toolmakers building the next generation of CLI applications. It offers clear explanations, battle-tested patterns, and real-world examples written in Go—an ideal language for high-performance, cross-platform development. Readers will also find Spotlights on widely adopted tools like Git, WP-CLI, and Warp Terminal, revealing the design thinking behind some of today’s most influential CLIs.
The book is interesting to me on multiple fronts. I’d like to think I’m a connoisseur of command-line interface (CLI) tools because of my long-time UNIX use. The history angle of the book is a quick hook.
When starting a new development project, I usually default to building a CLI. I’ve had it in the back of my head to do some research on best practices. Discovering CLI: … is really timely since it offers pragmatic design advice for CLI tools.
Also, Schaefer only publishes physical versions of his books.
I was alerted to the book via an excellent Software Engineering Radio podcast episode interview with Schaefer.
In this episode, Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats – json, rich text.
The interview was a rich conversation with real technical depth. No fluff. I probably don’t listen to SE Radio episodes often enough, but this one was a sterling example of the podcast’s quality. Also, the content has a Creative Commons license attached, making it handy for testing and demos.
Built using