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You Don't Need a GUI

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Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#131

Post by beckman466 »

After reading the headline I was hoping this post would shine a light on how gui’s hide the functions and steps a computer takes, and how this abstraction creates an image of computing as something extraordinarily complex, and how that’s a great loss for society as many people don’t learn about the basic building blocks of computing and computers, and how we are all the pooper for this development (which alienates a great deal of people due to the break-neck speed of modern society).

Please can we talk about that instead? I am not so interested read a list of actions which this author believes are superior to be performed using the CLI.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#132

Post by acomjean »

Does anyone still use Midnight commander? (mc from the command line). I think its falling out of favor, but I think a lot of people don't know about it.

Its a clone or the old Norton Commander which uses a termnal (curses based software) to create a kind of file browsing /copying/ moving tool. I like it because I know it, and its easy to browse through directories and veiw the files using a keyboard.

A breif guide with some screenshots: https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-install-midnight-c...

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#133

Post by msla »

karlicoss wrote: post #11

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…

GUIs have a nice ramp-up and a fixed ceiling, whereas command lines require you to climb a brick wall (the part where you learn enough commands to make it worthwhile, pretty much by rote) but, as long as they're scriptable, the ceiling is close to unlimited.

(TUIs are, or can be, GUIs with box drawing characters instead of pixel displays. They're not necessarily any more scriptable or any less discoverable; however, a TUI on top of a command line, like Norton Commander or Midnight Commander, can be a real winner of a design paradigm.)

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#134

Post by pie420 »

subsection1h wrote: post #95
macando wrote: post #58

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.

> Being away from the computer for two weeks will make you forget 80% of the CLI commands from the author's list. Sweet Jesus, the GUI lovers in this discussion really need to learn how to use computers. I have a text file that includes several thousand commands that I have run during the past 20+ years. In one column there are the commands with placeholders, and in the other column there are descriptions of the comm…

Is this satire? You're unironically arguing in favor of something that needs 20 years of Institutional knowledge to be compiled into a text file. When happens when you lose that file? What happens when you use a similar computer without that file.

You are so incredibly out of touch with regular human beings.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#136

Post by mikewarot »

In Windows, you can do

  dir /s graph.db
to find any occurrence of graph.db in any subdirectory|

The linux equivalent seems to be

  tree -f | grep -i graph\.db
However, this seems to be taking approximately forever

Edit - 20 minutes later, still not done, is this an O(N^2) operation? Edit - 35 minutes later, the wrong regex... have to do it again

tree -f | grep graph.db

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#137

Post by Animats »

karlicoss wrote: post #11

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…

The systems which did that, TOPS-20 and VMS, lost out to Unix, which didn't.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#138

Post by ww520 »

acomjean wrote: post #132

Does anyone still use Midnight commander? (mc from the command line). I think its falling out of favor, but I think a lot of people don't know about it. Its a clone or the old Norton Commander which uses a termnal (curses based software) to create a kind of file browsing /copying/ moving tool. I like it because I know it, and its easy to browse through directories and veiw the files using a keyboard. A breif guide wi…

I still use it occasionally. For one specific thing - tagging large files for batch delete.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#139

Post by cbsks »

mikewarot wrote: post #136

In Windows, you can do dir /s graph.db to find any occurrence of graph.db in any subdirectory| The linux equivalent seems to be tree -f | grep -i graph\.db However, this seems to be taking approximately forever Edit - 20 minutes later, still not done, is this an O(N^2) operation? Edit - 35 minutes later, the wrong regex... have to do it again tree -f | grep graph.db

Or:

  find . -name graph.db

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#140

Post by noisy_boy »

The biggest impetus to avoid using the GUI in my experience is when you are tired of doing the same damn steps you do everyday and want to automate it. Once you reach that stage, telling you so is preaching to the converted and then it becomes a matter of whether the actions you do on the GUI can be replaced by a series of commands that can be invoked programmatically. If they can't be, you do need _that_ GUI.
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