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You Don't Need a GUI

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Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#231

Post by d110af5ccf »

unnouinceput wrote: post #182
ben509 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been around since 1998, and after 23 years, their search is still a CLI stuck in a form. > Me, on the other hand, I can point you to a trillion dollar business that uses only GUI and not a single CLI, to say the least. No you can't. There are 5 companies with a market cap over a trillion. We can easily rule out Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google as they have all developed CLIs. That leaves Saudi Aramco. D…

Yes, I can. Game industry. See my other response to one of your siblings.

> Game industry.

Aside from that being an entire industry as opposed to a single company, are you not aware that BigCo games generally contain a developer console of some sort? Even the ones that don't provide end user access to it still usually have one buried somewhere.

Plus many of the dev tools for manipulating assets are either CLI based or have one integrated ...

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#232

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

cosmotic wrote: post #42
II2II wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different people will draw the line in different places. Take your example of file management: since I'm usually in a terminal, it takes far less effort to enter a command than it does to open up a graphical file manager and navigate to the desired directories. The other issue is that few file managers are as powerful as command line utilities. There are exceptions. I am quite fond of Directory Opus while using Windo…

There's more than just effort to consider. Discoverability, confidence, error recovery, and consistency come to mind. You might be in a terminal, in the directory you're you want to copy a file within... $open ., type file name, command-C, command-C, command-W would do a great job, require minimal additional effort, but provide better visibility into the status of the copy, allow you to better handle file name collis…

For 90% of this stuff “discoverability” isn’t a problem anymore, I’ve already crossed the learning curve of the command line and I just think in terms of the available command line programs. For the next 5%, I tend to pipe a command like find or ls to a file and then use vim to quickly make a shell script that does what I need.

I don’t know if it’s more efficient, objectively, but this just is the workflow that matches how I think.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#233

Post by weinzierl »

lanna wrote: post #92
koolba wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I don't remember the `df` command... what do I do apart from searching on the internet? You can do that locally on the command line too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apropos_(Unix)

But what if one doesn't remember the `apropos` command?

    apropos apropos
if you forget that

    apropos apropos apropos
Recursion solves every problem;-)

More seriously: You can alias it to something you can remember, for example:

    alias help=apropos

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#234

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

creata wrote: post #189
unnouinceput wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you miss the point of API's regardless of your programming language. If it's used inside a CLI then definitely I can write a GUI program that does the same.

You could write such a program, but my point is that it's a horrible inconvenience. CLI programs compose to the moon, but it's hard to get GUI programs to compose at all.

Alternatively, writing a program just is what you do at the shell with the find command, without building a GUI AND all the ceremony around getting a typical programming language needs to orchestrate processes.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#235

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

HKH2 wrote: post #75
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.

Terminals have history. Or if you are working locally, just put the command in a script and name it something more memorable. GUI layouts get moved around so you have to relearn where options are. In some cases, options get removed entirely in the name of 'user friendliness', whereas nobody's going to do that with CLI options. I used to think I knew the Firefox layout (I've used it for more than 15 years), but now it…

History is really important here: I have like 10k lines in my shell history file of all the tasks I do on a regular (and not so regular) basis all of them are an Escape-? away (vim bindings in my shell).

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#236

Post by mackrevinack »

with thinkpad keyboards you can control the cursor very quickly without having to move your hand off the keyboard at all.

i wonder sometimes if trackpoints were standard in every keyboard would this whole gui vs cli argument be much less of an issue.

it's definitely very inefficient having to move your hand to a mouse to do something, then back to the keyboard and find the home row position again. moving the cursor with a trackpoint only requires you to move your index finger to the side so a lot of things become much quicker than typing any command

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#237

Post by sph »

jcelerier wrote: post #222

> $ cp readme.txt documents/ sure, works fine in my ~, I have the follwing files: 'FOPC_0211237F_4563(1).pdf' FOPC_0211237F_4563.pdf FOPC_0251215K_4563.pdf FOPC_0381912X_4143.pdf FOPC_0381912X_4154.pdf FOPC_0755890V_282.pdf FOPC_0755890V_283.pdf FOPC_0755890V_284.pdf FOPC_0755890V_285.pdf FOPC_0755890V_286.pdf FOPC_0921204J_4652.pdf FOPC_0952259P_58.pdf FOPC_9830445S_4142.pdf Even with the very good zsh autocompletio…

Also cp will silently overwrite existing files (unless it's aliased to cp -i), while if you were using a GUI you'd get `(1)` appended to the filename, that while not very helpful, doesn't cause DATA LOSS when you don't know your way around the shell.

Agreed, it's written by an edgy teenager and I'm not sure who's the audience.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#238

Post by reeeeee »

jcelerier wrote: post #222

> $ cp readme.txt documents/ sure, works fine in my ~, I have the follwing files: 'FOPC_0211237F_4563(1).pdf' FOPC_0211237F_4563.pdf FOPC_0251215K_4563.pdf FOPC_0381912X_4143.pdf FOPC_0381912X_4154.pdf FOPC_0755890V_282.pdf FOPC_0755890V_283.pdf FOPC_0755890V_284.pdf FOPC_0755890V_285.pdf FOPC_0755890V_286.pdf FOPC_0921204J_4652.pdf FOPC_0952259P_58.pdf FOPC_9830445S_4142.pdf Even with the very good zsh autocompletio…

I agree, the STOP messages really trigger me. And the repo has 2.7k stars. But on the other hand, it's a very good resource to look up and discover some CLI commands that you didn't know already.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#239

Post by d110af5ccf »

aidenn0 wrote: post #168
lupire wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been 50 years. Why doesn't bash in a friendly system like Ubuntu have undo for mv.

You can't undo a file-move in (most?) GUI file managers either.

Windows Explorer, macOS Finder, KDE Dolphin, and GNOME Nautilus all beg to differ.

The issue is that tasks on the CLI tend to be split between many different utilities. So you'd either need a standardized method for sharing an undo tree between the different utilities, or alternatively to integrate all the different tasks under a single program.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#240

Post by incrudible »

freeone3000 wrote: post #187
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…

Except modern UI design sort of threw the aspect of discoverability out the window. Context-sensitive elements, dependent elements, hidden elements, and the dreaded hamburger menu are all awful for discoverability, and they're present on nearly every GUI.

There's always a space tradeoff, of course. If you didn't make some things contextual or put them behind a menu, you'd have to find permanent space for it on-screen. At some point, your UI then turns into a "Find Waldo" scenario.
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