Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You Don't Need a GUI

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 439 posts

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#341

Post by alexvoda »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262
Gehinnn wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think CLIs should be able to provide a very generic UI from their command definitions like this: https://github.com/hediet/ts-cli/blob/master/cli/README.md

Maybe one day everyone will adopt PowerShell as the CLI standard. PS scripts (and even functions) declare command line arguments up front, and depending on how much time and thought you put into it, you can constrain the arguments quite well. See [0] for overview of the available functionality. A quick TL;DR: - You can make parameters typed, and PS will handle relevant conversion if the user just types strings in. E.…

I would like to see a PowerShell equivalent to the autocompile feature in Visual Basic.Net where error checking is done after each character pressed.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#343

Post by alexvoda »

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.

Correction, on nearly every GUI since 2009 (introduction of the iPad).

Also, compared to the others you mentioned, hamburger menus are the most discoverable.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#344

Post by alexvoda »

ronyeh wrote: post #174
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…

I like your point about discoverability. What if there was such a thing as a right click menu for command line programs? Like if I type ffmpeg or youtube-dl with no args, it lists the 3 most common ways to use it, and maybe allows an interactive CLI menu where you can build up the correct argument list by answering a few questions. I would love the most useful commands to look like: ffmpeg --resizeVideoTo input.mp4 5…

> Or if I provide a partial argument list, it should ask me to supply the rest of the args. Or maybe it should guess and do the right thing.

PowerShell does this, but PowerShell is mostly despised by Linux users on forums.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#345

Post by Gehinnn »

alexvoda wrote: post #341
TeMPOraL wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one day everyone will adopt PowerShell as the CLI standard. PS scripts (and even functions) declare command line arguments up front, and depending on how much time and thought you put into it, you can constrain the arguments quite well. See [0] for overview of the available functionality. A quick TL;DR: - You can make parameters typed, and PS will handle relevant conversion if the user just types strings in. E.…

I would like to see a PowerShell equivalent to the autocompile feature in Visual Basic.Net where error checking is done after each character pressed.

I like powershell, but I find its Syntax very hard to learn for casual usage. -eq is just cruel if you are used to proper programming languages. I'd love to see a sane script language ala typescript established as general purpose shell/shell scripting language!

TypeScript is not yet expressive enough for direct shell usage, but not much is missing imo (most importantantly a pipe operator).

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#346

Post by jcelerier »

aulin wrote: post #301
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…

either those file names mean something and you don't have to look at the thumbnail or you should use a better naming convention... I wholeheartedly agree about the edgy teenager who just discovered bash

> either those file names mean something and you don't have to look at the thumbnail or you should use a better naming convention...

I mean, they certainly mean something, but I just downloaded them and I have no idea what (and definitely not the time to rename them to put human readable information in their name)

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#347

Post by tcfunk »

All well and good until you try one of these commands only to be told you don't have permission. Uh oh, now you're down the rabbit hole when all you really wanted to do was copy a file :)

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#349

Post by grumple »

Surprisingly negative reaction to this. From the OP:

> As a computer expert, we want to be more efficient and do our jobs better. We know that command words may not be easily discoverable or mnemonic, so we try to list some common tasks that you might be tempted to do in GUI.

The target audience is software engineers. And they are right. If you're a dev, you should become comfortable at the command line. It really is far faster and more efficient for the sort of tasks we do. If your mom wants to browse through image thumbnails, let her use the gui. If you want to manipulate data files, use the command line. The responses here indicate surprisingly few of us have to work with large amounts of file data.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#350

Post by eschneider »

skissane wrote: post #282
rewgs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? On IBM i (originally known as OS/400), you can press a function key and automatically get a fill-in-form for any command. This is because command line syntax is defined, not in your program's code (getopt calls etc), but using declarations in what you might consider to b…

Macintosh Programmers Workshop and I believe AU/X had this sort of functionality (different implementation, though) back in the 80s/early 90s. It was nice. :)
Post reply on HN