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This is a good reminder that defaults should be simple and human readable.

Advanced options should be behind flags for power users, not the other way around.

Indeed. I don't get it why `ip` has -brief which is not a default behavior and why -verbose flag does not exist. Also there could be a -no-color instead of -color flag.

Or simply detect when piped and leave the color out, as just about every sane cli tool does it.

Spot on. A good pattern is to autodetect what to do by default and yet allow forcing on/off (e.g. --color and --no-color)

Agreed. It could be as simple as checking if there is a tty and whether or not we're inside a pipe.

AFAICT these options are new(er) and making them the default would likely be a backwards-incompatible change. I can see how it would be an uphill battle to convince the maintainers to introduce what appears to be a breaking change.

That said, a new alias that does trigger these new behaviors as defaults would be a sane compromise.

Just update ip to emulate ifconfig and netstat when called as such, like busybox does. Or all of those MTAs that ship with a sendmail command.

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