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Shell
Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 10 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Quoting rules break on filenames with spaces or colonsUnreviewed
20092026- Can't escape a single quote inside single quotes, and nesting quotes is confusing2024-12-08
- Quoting rules are error-prone, breaking on filenames with spaces or colons2024-12-07
- Quoting and escaping rules make handling whitespace in text a major pain2023-08-01
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Can't escape a single quote inside single quotes, and nesting quotes is confusing2024-12-08
- Quoting rules are error-prone, breaking on filenames with spaces or colons2024-12-07
- Syntax is off-the-wall and easy to get wrong, causing obscure, hard-to-spot bugs2023-11-23
- Each tool invents its own separators and templates, so users must keep searching syntax2023-08-21
- Quoting and escaping rules make handling whitespace in text a major pain2023-08-01
- Piping requires planning and understanding each step; mistakes make it annoying2020-12-12
- Shell pipelines are hard to finish, forcing rewrites in Python when shell can't do a needed task2020-12-12
- Obscure one-letter flags and overly long manpages are hard to learn and use2020-09-05
- Heredoc quoting syntax is confusing, with unquoted versus quoted delimiters changing expansion behavior2020-04-03
- Shell syntax is obscure and hard to read for most people2015-01-20
- Selecting text without a mouse in the shell is really troublesome2009-08-05