it's the same mentality that brought us the git design - the easiest, least typing options are rarely, if ever the thing you want to do.
Instead, these invocations give cryptic messages, throw errors, or sometimes, even break things.
The most common and helpful things are hidden deep behind multiple flags and command line arguments in manuals that read like dictionaries more than guides.
I'm always at a complete loss as to how such decisions are made. For instance, "git branch -vv" is the useful output you would like to see, every time, that should be "git branch". Why not make the current output, "git branch -qq"? Is a humane interface too much to ask for? Apparently...
I know people defend this stuff, but as a senior engineer in programming pits for 30 years, they're wrong. Needless mistakes and confusions are the norm. We can do better.
We need to stop conflating elitism with fucked up design.
> Why not make the current output, "git branch -qq"? Is a humane interface too much to ask for? Apparently...
Yes, it is too much.
You have the wrong mentality, and I hope this can help make your life easier. Programs are made so that the simplest option is the base option. This is because there is a high expectation that things will be scripted AND understanding that there is a wide breadth of user preference. There's an important rule
DON'T TRY TO MAKE A ONE SIZE FITS ALL PROGRAM
Customization is at the root of everything. We have aliases that solve most of the problems and small functions for everything else. You default to an non-noisy output, showing only __essentials__ and nothing more unless asked. Similarly, you do no filtering other than hidden files. This way, everyone can get what they want. Btw, this is why so many people are upset with default options on things like fdfind and ripgrep.
For your problem with git, there are 2 solutions you have.
# alias git branch using git
git config --global alias.branch 'branch -vv'
# write a simple function and add to .bashrc or .zshrc or .*rc
git() {
case "$1" in
branch)
shift
command git branch -vv "$@"
;;
*)
command git "$@"
;;
esac
}
> We need to stop conflating elitism with fucked up design.
The design isn't fucked up, it is that you don't understand the model. This is okay. You aren't going to learn it unless you read docs or books on linux. If you learn the normal way, by usage, then it is really confusing at first. But there is a method to the madness. Things will start making more sense if you understand the reason for the design choices. (In a sibling comment I wrote the abstraction to command patterns that makes the gp's confusion odd. Because systemd follows the standard)
Side note: if you try to design something that works for everyone or works for the average person, you end up designing something that is BAD for most people. This is because people's preference is not uniformly distributed, meaning the average person is not representative of any person in the distribution. This is because anything that is normally distributed has its density along the shell while a uniform distribution has a uniform density all throughout it.
If every person has the same point of confusion than they are not the problem, it's the thing they're confused by.
There's better ways to do things and calling people naive for suggesting the obvious is the problem.
And about your side note: no. For example, when people checkout a branch, they want to track the remote branch 99.9% of the time. It should be the default.
The default journalctl should show where things have failed, that's why people are invoking it.
Also there's plenty of counterexamples that do these things. "ping host" genuinely pings the host. "ssh host" genuinely ssh's into the host.
You don't need to specify say, the encryption algorithm, that you want a shell, use say, "--resolve=dns" to specify the hostname resolution... It has sensible defaults that do what most people intend.
Under the model you advocate for "ssh host" would simply open up a random socket connection and then you'd have to manually attach a virtual terminal to it and request the invocation of shell separately, stacking each piece on top of the other, before you log in.
This design could be defended in the same way: Some people do port mapping, tunneling, SOCKS proxies, there's too many use cases! How can we assume the user wants a shell? Answer: because they do.
Most things are reasonable like certbot, apt, tune2fs, mkfs, awk, cut, paste, grep, sort, so many reasonable things. Even emacs is reasonable.
But systemd and git are not and the users are not the problems. Choices were made to be hostile to usability and they continue to be defended by being hostile to usability. Things like lex and yacc are inherently complicated and there's nothing to do there. Other things are intentionally complicated. Those can be fixed.
> The default journalctl should show where things have failed
How? What do you filter for? Emergency? Critical? Error? Alert? (see `dmesg -l`). What's the default? Do you do since boot? Since a certain time? Since restart?
FWIW, I invoke it all the time for other reasons. I am legitimately checking the status. Is it online? Do I have it enabled? What's the PID? Where's the file (though I can run `sudo systemctl edit foo.service`)? What's the memory usage? When did it start? And so on. The tail of the log are useful but not the point of status.
If I'm looking to debug a service I look at the journal instead. I hope this helps
# Show 10 most recent logs (you don't know what service to debug)
journalctl -r -n 10
# Show recent logs for a known service (can tab complete)
journalctl -r -n 10 --unit foo.service
# Some useful flags
-S, -U
Since and until. Time filtering including keywords {now, yesterday, today, tomorrow}
-b
Since boot. You can even do since a specific boot! Or even `--boot=-1` for the last 2 boots
-p, --priority
You can use the numbers 0-7 representing {emerg,alert,crit,err,warning,notice,info,debug} respectively
-g, --grep
No comment needed
-f, --follow
This is the tool while debugging since it'll update.
-e, --pager-end
Start at the end of the pager
> that's why people are invoking it.
That's why __you're__ using it, but don't assume that your usecase is the general. Remember, linux has a large breadth in types of users. But their biggest market is still servers and embedded systems. There's far more of those than PC users.
> Choices were made to be hostile to usability and they continue to be defended by being hostile to usability.
Idk, when systemd became the main thing I hated it too. But mostly because it was different and I didn't know how to use it. But then I learned and you know what? I agreed. This took awhile though and I had to see the problems they are solving. Otherwise it looks really bloaty and confusing. Like why have things like nspawn? Why use systemd jobs instead of using cron? Why use systemd-homed instead of useradd?
Well a big part of it is security and flexibility.
I write systemd services now instead of cron jobs. With a cron job I can't make private tmps[0]. Cron won't run a job if the computer is off during the job time. Cron can't stagger services. Cron can't wait for other services first. Cron can't be given limited CPU, memory, or other resource limitations.
Nspawn exists to make things highly portable. Chroot on steroids is used for a reason. Being able to containerize things, placing specific capabilities and all that. This is all part of a systemd job anyways. It really makes it a lot easier to give a job the minimum privileges. So often nspawn is a better fit than things like docker.
Same goes for homed. You can do things like setting timezones unique to users. But there's so much more like how it can better handle encryption. And you can do really cool things like move your home directory from one machine to another. This might seem like a non-issue to most people but it isn't. That whole paradigm where your keyboard is just an interface to a machine (i.e. a terminal, and I don't mean the cli. There's a reason that's called a terminal "emulator"). This is a really useful thing when you work on servers.
Look, there's a reason the distros switched over. It's not collective madness.
I'm not assuming I'm the default. I've worked countless jobs where I'm the "linux guy". These are the most common points of failure for everyone.
You have yet again showed how you are one of the 0.1%.
Why should the defaults be to accommodate for you?
I've been using linux for over 30 years. I'm in that group photo on the Debian.org homepage, given Linux conference talks spanning decades...
I know I'm in a very small minority and don't expect everyone to be me.
I work a support shift at a cloud hosting company and constantly deal with our customers struggling with linux on the same pain points over and over and over again. We have a bunch of auto-replies to explain things because everyone trips over the same broken sidewalk and people insist it's not broken but instead, it's beautiful design. Alright, whatever. Keeps me employed. Cool.
This is the same problem that mathematics has. Elite mathematicians insist that they should give zero shits about trying to explain things and their convoluted impenetrable explanations are elegant - it's an ultra-exclusive nerd club and most people aren't invited regardless of their interest.
Making things more approachable is somehow, cognitively unavailable to them or against some deeply held constitution. Whatever it is, it's not happening.
Some people think iOS is successful and some people think Mobian should be. I try to understand the first group and not insist everyone be in the second.
> Elite mathematicians insist that they should give zero shits about trying to explain things and their convoluted impenetrable explanations are elegant
I'm here trying to explain...
I'm very much not trying to be like the Arch userforum and say that this problem was solved 3 years 7 months, 22 days, 9 hrs, and 13 minutes ago but will also not provide you a link or any more reference to this because I'm closing the topic. There 100% are elitists. But not everyone who agrees with their point is an elitist. That experience is always frustrating because a noob doesn't know what questions to ask or what terms to search. It's true that in any domain that a task is literally easier for the domain expert than the noob because the noob doesn't even know where to start looking.
As for users, I do agree that there's a lot of common stumbling blocks. But I also notice (the same problem exists in math) that a holistic view is not taught with or before specifics. These things have to be taught together, but if you try to just learn linux a command at a time (math an equation at a time or programming a function/algorithm at a time) you're going to be stunted for a very long time. The abstractions matter.
But why are aliases and functions disallowed? I've thought the TUI boom has been a great thing for users, although I wish TUI developers would spend just a bit more time doing design and understand that "has vim movements" means more than h,j,k,l arrow keys... There's lots of great alternatives to the most common coreutils. But I am still a firm believer that people should be making their own rc files. Especially today where it is trivial to carry them around with you. Hell, I even throw notes in my dotfiles. The whole thing is 84M and 81M of that is vim plugins, so not even part of the git repo.
> Some people think iOS is successful
Well I still don't know how to get my iPhone to stop correcting two words back. You'd think turning off General > Keyboard > Auto-Correction would do it. Nope. Maybe Predictive Text? Also no. But then again, you'd think that Auto-Capitalization would capitalize the letter I when it is used as a single character but again, no, and you can always recognize an iPhone user because their "i"'s are never capitalized.
I'll tell you this. Linux is a pain. All of software is a pain. 90% of software is a pain and has no fucking reason to be. I can give you a hundred examples where trivial things make a huge difference. From fucking Meta's download for Llama not telling you how much disk space it uses and hard coding the destination (2 problems), how calendard won't merge holidays and instead you have 5 instances of MLK Jr's day, or how I can't disable Apple Music or remap my media keys so I can stop the god damn Music player app from opening or get it to stop playing some random youtube video in a lost tab rather than play the song on spotify that I literally just paused. But the reason I choose linux is because I can fucking fix those things. I hate it. So much of it. You're so right that so many things don't have to be this way. But at least with linux and it's design choices, I can fucking fix things. It isn't just the open source aspect that makes that possible and it isn't just documentation, it is the mentality that things should be small and simple. To really take to heart the concept of monads.
systemctl reboot -f should be the default for "reboot".
People generally already make sure there's nothing they care about running and then issue a reboot often because something is broken.
It's already mostly a manual override. The default makes it not a manual override but instead yet another operation of a system that is, under most reboot conditions, assumed to be tainted in some way.
If you want reboot to potentially require IPMI or some kind of manual intervention, it should be an option like
or something that makes it very very clear what you're asking it to do.
Because how it currently is, reboot does not reboot, instead it inquires a potentially malfunctioning system what its opinion is on rebooting.
It effectively assumes every system is always in pristine condition and that users reboot out of boredom. If someone’s issuing a reboot, it's because something is wrong, and the system should treat that as the primary assumption.
> systemctl reboot -f should be the default for "reboot".
I very much disagree. This is not what I want and certainly you can recognize that this is an unsafe operation, right? Less safe operations should ALWAYS require more work. Not everyone checks and it is also easy to forget or miss something.
I like the --ask-everything option but I'm not sure how the other 2 can work. A crash, especially during shutdown, can have no guarantees of being caught. Or do you mean crashing user programs? Well then that's --force, right? The --wait-indefinitely-ok seems a bit weird too. Shouldn't that be configured in your boot options (or bootctl)? I do think there's reasons you might want this in one situation but not another so flag sounds good.
> If someone’s issuing a reboot, it's because something is wrong
On personal machines: >9/10 times I'm rebooting because I installed a new kernel. Granted I'm usually running an arch distro, but even on other machines it's pretty similar.
On servers, yes, you're right, I reboot far less and am usually rebooting because a specific GPU server has a defective GPU that is often a pain to solve with rmmod and resetting manually, being just far easier to reboot the entire machine.
But I still think it's clear that what you think is "average" or "usual" is not. Literally the fact that you and I disagree on what our typical use cases is proof of this (note: I'm not saying _my average_ use case extrapolates, nor your average use case, nor anyone else I know or even don't know. I'm saying _average_ is not a meaningful thing. I mean this in the same way as taking the average of 2 samples from a normal distribution; doing so gives you a number that is not representative of the distribution).
Some behavior has to be chosen for some invocation.
I continue to express what countless people struggle with and potential usability fixes, and you continue to insist your personal preference is supreme and unilaterally invalidates everyone's frustration.
It's like insisting all cars should have tillers, manual chokes, and hand cranks because you personally like them and then handwaving some "average" argument when someone advocates for easier systems.
And that's the attitude what keeps Linux useful but not usable.
I've heard this reasoning multiple times, but that doesn't make it right. Like you said, you ARE presuming something: That scripting and a (useless) base case are the most common usage.
How many people script Git? More importantly, how often do you change that script? Rarely, and rarely. That means it's FAR FAR less work for the scripter to look up the weird incantations to remove the "human" parts (like a quiet flag).
Conversely, the human is far more likely to write git commands impromptu, and I dare say, this is the FAR FAR more common use case.
That means Git (and a lot of these kinds of commands) optimize for the RARE choice that happens infrequently over the common case that happens often. That's horrible design.
TL;DR: Just because there's a consistent design philosophy behind obtuse linux commands does not make a good, helpful, useful, modern, or simple philosophy. If a library author wrote code this way, we'd all realize how horrible that design is.
> That scripting and a (useless) base case are the most common usage.
You're thinking as a user. I'm sorry, but the vast majority of linux systems are still servers and embedded systems.
Here's two versions of the Unix Philosophy
- Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
- Write programs to work together.
- Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
- Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.
- Interactive use instead of batch processing.
- Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").
- Self-supporting system: all Unix software is maintained under Unix.
Yes, scripting is a common use case (I use git in scripts! I use git in programs. You probably do too, even if you don't know it). Piping is a common use case. And I'm not sure what we're talking about that is "useless". I've yet to run into a command where the default is useless. Even though I have `alias grep='grep --color=always --no-messages --binary-files=without-match'` I still frequently run `\grep`.
But we're also talking about programs that are DECADES old. git will turn 20 this year. You're going to be breaking a lot of stuff if you change it now.
And look, you don't have to agree, that's fine. But I'm trying to help you get into a mindset so that this doesn't look like a bunch of gobbledegook. You call these weird incantations. I get it. But if you get this model and get why things are the way they are, then those incantations become a lot less weird and a lot easier to remember. Because frankly, you'll have to remember far less. And either way, it's not like you're going to get linux changed. If you don't use it, great, move on. But if you do, then I'm trying to help, because if you can't change it you got to figure out the way.
Man, we're talking about git. It has never subscribed to this philosophy (and most programs in *nix don't)
Git does about fifteen thousand different things with about fifteen million flags.
And it was never designed. It was thrown together as a kitchen sink of useful things with commands adding new and crazy incantations as new things were added.
"Just write this script to do the useful thing" is a weird hill to die on
Fully this. For all its foibles, Linux was built to never presume too much, and its users tend to be power users who will almost certainly have dotfiles to tune their systems to their needs. In the context of making choices that will necessarily be universal, I admire how thoughtfully most standard Linux packages have been designed to never interfere with the users’ intentions.
Making things customizable doesn't mean the defaults should be useless. zsh, tmux, emacs, vim and bash, out of the box, for instance, have both pretty nice defaults and are highly customizable.
I know it's hard to make things like this but let's do it anyway.
And to all the linux noobies[0], you'll be a hell of a lot more efficient if you learn the philosophy of the design early. It will make it so that you can learn a new command and instantly know how to use several options. It will dramatically reduce the number of things you have to learn. I also HIGHLY suggest learning a bit of bash scripting.
Live in the terminal as much as you can. It is harder at first, but you will get huge boosts in productivity quicker than you would know it (easily <2 weeks). It sucks doing things "the hard way" but sometimes that comes with extra lessons. The thing is, those extra lessons are the real value.
[0] no matter how many years you've been using it there's no shame in being a noobie
None of those problems are unsolvable. The basic idea is: your terminal and script can get two different outputs. Git can already do that with colours, so it can also use more verbose for basic commands.
The other part is - scripts can use longer options while the console commands should be optimised for typing.
This has nothing to do with understanding the model or model itself. Complex things can have good interfaces - those just require good interface design and git did not get much of that.
> Git can already do that with colours, so it can also use more verbose for basic commands.
You already answered your own question. There's plenty of terminals that don't support colors. Plenty that don't support 16 bit colors. Do a grep into a curl and you'll find some fun shenanigans.
> This has nothing to do with understanding the model or model itself.
You're right. This has to do with you thinking your usecase is the best or most common.
As stated before, there is no average user[0]. So the intent is that you have the command that can be built upon. Is everyone unhappy with the base command? Probably. But is is always easier to build up than to tear down.
[0] Again, linux servers and linux embedded devices significantly out number users. Each of them do. So even if there were an average user, guess what, it wouldn't be you.
> There's plenty of terminals that don't support colors.
Colour support is irrelevant to this case. They can check isatty() and give different output depending on that.
And verbose information is better in average case, if it's well formatted. Unless you're flooding the screen with useless data of course, but that's not what's being talked about here.
Honestly, no. I hate this. I spend far more time filtering output than trying to generate more. I'm glad I have the option to generate more, because sometimes the needle isn't in the haystack. But usually more verbose output just means adding more hay.
Again, it is really easy to add more output and this is actually an easier problem than the reverse. FATAL ERROR WARN INFO DEBUG TRACE log levels have been around for awhile and they've been working really well.
I'll let you in on something. If you're frequently having to reach for verbose outputs, there's probably a better tool. That is, unless if it is personal preference. Which in that case, alias is for you. I have to reiterate, the "average case" and "average user" does not exist. This argument will not get you anywhere because you're talking about a unicorn. No matter how much you think they exist, they don't. It is only average within a more specific subdomain. It might appear average to you because you work with those types of people and are part of those communities, but someone else from a different community will have very different viewpoints. So it is very intentional that things are not designed for "the average" because there is none.
Instead, these invocations give cryptic messages, throw errors, or sometimes, even break things.
The most common and helpful things are hidden deep behind multiple flags and command line arguments in manuals that read like dictionaries more than guides.
I'm always at a complete loss as to how such decisions are made. For instance, "git branch -vv" is the useful output you would like to see, every time, that should be "git branch". Why not make the current output, "git branch -qq"? Is a humane interface too much to ask for? Apparently...
I know people defend this stuff, but as a senior engineer in programming pits for 30 years, they're wrong. Needless mistakes and confusions are the norm. We can do better.
We need to stop conflating elitism with fucked up design.