Rsync, GUIs, power, control, design, and decisions

> Is it better to make up common rsync “recipes” for people to use, or is it better to let folks have access to ALL of the flags [...] and pick’n’mix what they want?

I think both. This is the hard part about GUI design -- it is pretty easy to make a list of 100 command-line options listed alphabetically on the man page, but for GUIs, people expect much more.

There should be some sort of logical grouping. One area of the screen would be options related to what is transferred, a second area is metadata, the third one is speed-only optimizations, fourth is logging and so on. Having "hardlinks" all the way on the left and "symlinks" all the way on the right does not make a good GUI.

There is a very wide variety of input elements, so checkboxes are are not the right solution all the time! For example, while having separate "--verbose" and "--quiet" options is fine for CLI, one would expect to see a drop-down or a slider in the GUI. This will decrease cognitive load because there are less things to read and there is no need to worry what happens if you check both.

Another great GUI feature is dynamicity -- take the metadata for example. A good design might have a dropdown: "everything", "nothing", "x-bit only", "custom". Most of the time, first three options would be fine, but "custom" will show entire new group of checkboxes.

... this was just my subjective design, based on how I use the program. If I were trying to do a popular product, I'd have to spend some time asking people / looking at the forums to determine which sets of features do people use. For all that I know, there is a super common case for "--group" without "--owner", and this is just me not knowing about it.

rsync is one of those tools that I use so infrequently that I’d rather have a good GUI than have to relearn the command switches every time I use it.

What?

Nothing like 10 minutes of scrolling with the keyboard through man to avoid 5 seconds of mouse clicking in a GUI.

Only unproductive amateurs use the mouse...

I really wish there were more GUI wrappers that literally wrote the CLI commands out on screen as the GUI was modified, to help with bridging the GUI/CLI gap for people.

Also, I miss arRsync.

I would think there maybe a "command-line" version of GUI design: supply limited default buttons for common options, but allow user customization. For example, I would love to have the button from author's design but tune it specifically to my need including running a specific set of "command lines".