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The Modern CLI Renaissance

Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line interface, why I think this trend might be happening, and why I think this trend is a good thing.

Vim (top right) greatly improved on Vi, adding things such as syntax highlighting, line numbers, spellchecking, split windows, folding, and even basic autocompletion. For example, the earliest things I did when I first made a.vimrc was to enable indent folding, make some better keybinds for navigating windows, and adding a line number ruler to the side. Due to the syntax error coming from bc rather than bash directly, even the line number it gives you is misleading, and in order to have the slightest clue whats going on, you have to start print debugging.

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