>youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults
not really, if you copy url of a clip in a playlist it will start downloading WHOLE playlist :(
not really, if you copy url of a clip in a playlist it will start downloading WHOLE playlist :(
Some people want to download the whole playlist when passing a URL from one of the videos (because otherwise it's hard to get an URL that contains just the playlist). Some other people just want to download the video they are currently watching.
That's why we have the --no-playlist option, which you can use and even stick in the configuration file. There's also --yes-playlist to override the configuration file if you need to.
Side-benefit: force care to be taken to be explicit if used in a script.
Personally, without reading any docs the first thing I did was paste in just a video ID (i.e. not the entire URL) so it seems natural to me that including both would be ambiguous.
Introducing breaking changes like this are no longer an option once your program has more than 5 users.
In addition, well-behaved command line programs aren't supposed to gratuitously prompt for input anyway.
One thing I always change from the default behaviour is video quality: by default it wastes a ton of bandwidth and disk space getting "HD" versions. I can understand why that's the default, but I don't particularly care about resolution, as it's a pretty negligible contributor to quality compared to the actual content of the video.