You Don't Need a GUI
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You Don't Need a GUI
1–10 of 439 posts
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#2I'm not sure how big the subset of people that use unix systems and are ignorant of the command line is.
Most of your GUI users are on Windows, and unix shell commands mostly do not work or are aliased to other commands that don't work exactly the same way as they do in GNUland.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#3This is great! I learned a couple of new commands today, and I've been on unix for years.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#4I'm not sure how big the subset of people that use unix systems and are ignorant of the command line is. Most of your GUI users are on Windows, and unix shell commands mostly do not work or are aliased to other commands that don't work exactly the same way as they do in GNUland.
Oddly enough, even in the Windows world, I'm seeing more and more instructions for things like installing a software app or component, as a list of commands that you enter into the shell or the taskbar search box.
Installation instructions for Windows are horrifying -- page after page of pictures, with circles and arrows and a paragraph... And when the OS is updated, all of the dialog layouts and icons change just a bit and you're lost. Just gimme some shell commands.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#5Most the things in this list are things that you technically don't need a GUI for, but a GUI is so much better that doing it in command line is pointless. For instance, you could do all those file operations in the terminal, but chances are you're already browsing files using a GUI file manager so opening a terminal to do those things is pointless. Terminal is great if you want to do something complicated that a GUI program can't handle, or you need some sort of automation (ie. programming).
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#6I'm not sure how big the subset of people that use unix systems and are ignorant of the command line is. Most of your GUI users are on Windows, and unix shell commands mostly do not work or are aliased to other commands that don't work exactly the same way as they do in GNUland.
> I'm not sure how big the subset of people that use unix systems and are ignorant of the command line is.
Probably way more than you'd think. Most people get thrown into the unix shell at some point without learning it properly. And its easy to accidentally miss a lot of fundamentals due to imposter syndrome + the terminal's terrible discoverability.
I made a simple build system at a company I worked at a few years ago to build production docker images. It was a little nodejs process which ran docker build in a subprocess, and streamed stdout / stderr to the browser. So you could kick off a build with a few clicks of the mouse and you could see it build + deploy. The whole thing was just a couple hundred lines of code that I whipped it up in a day or two.
Some of my coworkers were way more impressed than I expected. They're great senior web programmers, but apparently they just never learned unix properly and didn't realise how easy it is to do stuff like that.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#7I’d argue that if you’re using an ncurses based UI, you no longer have a command line interface, and you’re not scriptable anymore. Which is fine of course, but what you really have at that point is a rather ugly and limited GUI...
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#8I'm not sure how big the subset of people that use unix systems and are ignorant of the command line is. Most of your GUI users are on Windows, and unix shell commands mostly do not work or are aliased to other commands that don't work exactly the same way as they do in GNUland.
Oddly enough, even in the Windows world, I'm seeing more and more instructions for things like installing a software app or component, as a list of commands that you enter into the shell or the taskbar search box. Installation instructions for Windows are horrifying -- page after page of pictures, with circles and arrows and a paragraph... And when the OS is updated, all of the dialog layouts and icons change just a…
Even worse is the more recent trend of Youtube videos showing you how to do something on your computer.
"OK, GUYS! We're going to start at the desktop. Now click on Start..."
Watch someone moving their mouse around for 20 minutes, making mistakes, backtracking, hovering over things so they remember what to do, then finally achieving what the tutorial was about. Ending the video with "Don't forget to like and subscribe!"
This could have been a single command line command.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#9This is terrific.
But...
GUIs support the concept of undo. It would be great if all shells indicated the command to undo what you just did, and you could turn off that warning message with an environment variable.
And, almost none of these work in the Windows command prompt. I've tried powershell and while there are some great ideas, nothing behaves as I would expect after using bash for 20+ years.
These are the reasons people use the GUI. Without acknowledgement of that, this readme loses some of it's lustre.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#10I’d argue that if you’re using an ncurses based UI, you no longer have a command line interface, and you’re not scriptable anymore. Which is fine of course, but what you really have at that point is a rather ugly and limited GUI...
I agree. Although for most tasks I tend to prefer having a command line interface, just because of things like programmability and my typing speed, I'd be lying to go as far as to say the CLI is _always_ the best way to do something. For example, I like to construct git commits using a GUI, since I'm faster at selecting lines to commit than I am sifting through potentially hundreds of changes looking for the right one to add to a particular commit.
Additionally, I think some of the listed tasks are objectively better in the GUI, despite being possibly slower. For example, in the command line, deleting a file doesn't send it to the "Recycle Bin" or your OS's equivalent, it simply deletes it. This is better for things like scripts, but worse for someone using it as a GUI replacement, since now there's a risk that they could permanently delete an important file due to misspelling or something of the sort. I find it hard to remember sometimes that Emacs is a GUI too, and it can often be the best way to do any given task.