81–90 of 439 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I struggle with memorizing CLI commands' parameters and special characters. This happens with git commands too and I use them all the time. Something like CLI autocomplete would be awesome.
Fish can autocomplete Git commands; no configuration is necessary. It generally has friendy defaults unlike Bash.
Most 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…
> find . -print | sed -e 's;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g' Naturally
I’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...
If you're okay with waiting 5-10 seconds for your editor to load, fine.
Is this satire? Every single example shown is quicker and easier in a GUI. Shell scripting and pipes are the only times a command-line is better than a GUI.
Regular users rarely type in commands. Either reverse search or zsh/fish/bash auto completion makes it much easier to run something in one two key strokes compared to few clicks in a GUI. Also switching to mouse from keyboard constantly slowes you down.
The inefficiency of mouse as interface is best illustrated in Excel which has power user shortcuts for every menu item. Expert users will never use the mouse if they can avoid it for the same reason. IDEs and many other apps work the same way.
Finally for developers who hav to work with servers, You don't have the luxury of working with GUI, you will have to learn these kind of commands anyway, using these locally on your desktop is more convenient.
Once learned the GUI actions are impossible to forget. Being away from the computer for two weeks will make you forget 80% of the CLI commands from the author's list. The reason is simple: the brain can associate the GUI actions to many concepts from the real world. CLI concepts exist on computers and nowhere else. That knowledge is too abstract and too expensive to be kept unused in our brain's cache non-stop.
Beside that, it still entails that you've to "wire your brain" so that it integrate the twisted specific ways they map on "the real world", with no guarantee that they won't change for external reasons, nor that there will be any sort of consistency across applications.
I think a killer GUI feature that I've never seen would be a log that shows you the text-based equivalent of every action you take.
GUI is better for discoverability of the most common scenarios (I can right-click to see everything that can be done with the file, including some third party programs). But it's bad for composing programs and interoperability, often it's impossible or very hard to automate (how many people are doing UI testing? there is a good reason it's not many -- it completely sucks) TUI/console is very good for interoperability…