Capitalized Letter is the Default

Today I learned something fun about command line interfaces— when presented with a list of choices such as yes, no, or quit, the capitalized choice is the default in many Unix-based CLIs.

Here's some aptitude:

% sudo apt-get install whatever
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python-cssselect python-glade2 python-pyquery
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 43 not upgraded.
Need to get 497 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2,207 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

The interface waits for your Y ('yes') or n ('no').

Because 'yes' is capitalized, it's the default, simply pressing ENTER is the same as pressing Y, then ENTER. Enjoy your extra keystrokes!

Tweet