The people on HN don’t need a GUI. Most of our parents, spouses, and bosses have zero interest in the command line.
Zero interest? 99% of people I speak to would have no idea what the "command line" even is, let alone be interested in it.
You Don't Need a GUI
241–250 of 439 posts
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#242Earlier 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?
The same thing if someone does not remember there is a right mouse button?
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#243GUI 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.
For everything negative you can say about modern UI patterns like the hamburger menu, lack of discoverability isn‘t one of them imho. You have a single button with an almost-standardized icon, from which you can get an overview of all the (non-context-sensitive) actions. Relative to menu bars, the actions are sorted more by their importance than some vague categories. (Where do you find Settings? Under File, Edit or Help? No, as a top-level entry of the hamburger menu.) Of course it has its own problems, like number of clicks...
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fair part of what I do includes ERP implementation project work. Way back, when TUI/keyboard centric ERP system dominance was starting to give way to GUI/mouse centric ERP systems, I was working with one client where replacing a TUI with GUI based system. One measure we made during the project was the impact to new employee training time and we saw significant reductions in training time due to the sorts of discove…
What about a system that shows actions in a GUI as a list of equivalent plain text commands. New users would have the discoverability of a GUI while being able to see what goes on command-wise. With time they would be able to convert to plain-text commands and scripting for increased efficency.
I think CLIs should be able to provide a very generic UI from their command definitions like this:
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#245Once 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.
There's a GUI I need to use twice a year. It contains confusing icons and processes that take multiple clicks with no way to come back. I used to do variations of the same mistakes every time until I wrote the steps in a text file (in other words I translated the graphical actions into text to remember them)
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#246I just love CLI apps due to the sheer power they provide me and for composability. But every time I do any file operation I still get a tiny bit anxious. Did I mistype anything? Will some of my files get overwritten? Things like that. Compare `cp` on a brand new machine without aliases and colours with something like copy resolution dialog in DoubleCommander or `rsync --help` with the interface of the FreeFileSync, which provide copious amounts of feedback (or feedforward).
It's just a silly preposition. We need both and we'll definitely get use of the new ways too, if they ever come.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#247I avoid using the terminal because it's just too easy to loose data. There are tons of commands that overwrite files, delete whole directories, or even overwrite blocks on the disk, and very few of them allow for simulation and delayed execution like e.g. GParted does. You always have to triple check to not shoot yourself in the foot.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
'help' is already the shell's built-in help function in most cases. That'd be a poor choice of alias.
There are a small number of seed keywords which are ueeful to know. 'help' (shell), 'apropos', 'man' (online manual), 'info' (GNU documentation), and dwww (local documentation presented through a Web interface, available on Debian-based Linux, see https://ostechnix.com/dwww-view-complete-debian-documentatio...) are among them.
Knowledge requires a certain baseline.
If that's too much ... perhaps a GUI is in fact advisable.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#249Advocating for GUI tools is all fun and games until a design or marketing guy decides they know what's good for you better than you and moves everything into more inconvenient places.
Yes, hamburger menus, CSDs, all of you, I'm looking at you.
Re: You Don't Need a GUI
#250GUI 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…
I totally agree, and this is one reason why, broadly speaking, command line applications often turn me off, even though in theory I prefer them for the reasons you laid out. There's a sort of implication that you're not "in the club" if you don't remember this or that flag. Why then isn't a kind of very simple approximation of a GUI (or, at least, easily-discoverable commands) more common in command line applications…
I just keep cheatsheets handy. For new scenarios, if I find they aren't already on the sheet, I add them. The best command line tools have good documentation you can find with a command like "help" or the "-h" flag. I am slightly annoyed there isn't a convention for this though. Perhaps it should be made into a RFC standard.