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

361–370 of 439 posts

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#361

Post by anthk »

unnouinceput wrote: post #18
gruez wrote: post #5

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…

Quote: "..you want to do something complicated that a GUI program can't handle..." Name one thing that a GUI program can't handle, I dare you. 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.

     find ~ -iname Makefile -exec sed -i ´s,-g,,g´ {} +

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#362

Post by anthk »

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.

- ImageMagick

- Optipng

- ffmpeg

- sox

And so on.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#363

Post by ori_b »

alexvoda wrote: post #335
ori_b wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are text mode action-oriented apps: ncurses/turbo vision/etc. based applications like Commander, or the old Borland IDE, or Tilde, or the old FoxPro, or plenty others.* These are graphical programs, just with a substandard drawing api.

You did not get the point the parent (me) and grandparents made. They are not graphical programs. They are generally recognised as TUI programs. If these are graphical then so is Vi or the fancy powerline prompt. Our point was that you can also have command lines in graphical applications and WIMP in text mode applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(co…

Of course vi is graphical. Vi is literally short for 'visual': it was created as a graphical extension of ex.

The mark of a command line is a stream of commands and responses, not whether it does ascii art to emulate graphics.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#364

Post by jodrellblank »

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.…

They have worked on improving error messages between Windows PowerShell and PowerShell, e.g.

    PS C:\> 1/0
    Attempted to divide by zero.
    At line:1 char:1
    + 1/0
    + ~~~
        + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], RuntimeException
        + FullyQualifiedErrorId : RuntimeException
is now:

    PS C:\> 1/0
    RuntimeException: Attempted to divide by zero.
And everywhere else they've tried to make a shorter, clearer default error.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#365

Post by stjohnswarts »

I moved an old GUI based program over to a new system built on simple text menus and letting the user type in a basic subset of commands. At first there was resistance but after a couple of days of using it and some emails the engineers used it loved it because they could do all the stuff they used to do with mouse clicks with their keyboard, most said at least 2 times as fast. So the up front usage wasn't as nice as a GUI but since it is used often a bit muscle memory typing and not having to look anywhere but the screen and everyone but one person loved it. I think he'll come around. BTW, I'm not a GUI programmer, I've done a few but they're always ugly and I tend to like backend much more :) . Hence I chose an old fashioned text version. It's not pretty but it's much more efficient. Yeah I know this isn't for all use cases but in mine I felt it was the better choice.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#366

Post by TeMPOraL »

jodrellblank wrote: post #364
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.…

They have worked on improving error messages between Windows PowerShell and PowerShell, e.g. PS C:\> 1/0 Attempted to divide by zero. At line:1 char:1 + 1/0 + ~~~ + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], RuntimeException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : RuntimeException is now: PS C:\> 1/0 RuntimeException: Attempted to divide by zero. And everywhere else they've tried to make a shorter, clearer default error.

Good to know, thanks! I've been mostly developing on the Windows PowerShell, but I'm about to move to PowerShell/.NET Core, so I'm happy to know error messaging improves there.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#367

Post by stjohnswarts »

bregma wrote: post #308
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…

>GUI is better for discoverability of the most common scenarios (I can right-click to see everything that can be done with the file... You know the secrets on how to use the Microsoft Windows 95 GUI so it's easy for you. Consider the person who has not been trained over years in its use. The concept of a context menu that pops up at the mouse position when clicking button number two is not intuitive or discoverable.…

Meh if my grandma can get folders and hidden menus with just using simple box in a box analogies and a couple of drawings of the difference between RAM, hard drive, and CPU I'm sure your wife can too. Sometimes there's just the lack of curiosity about such things that prevents people from learning it, not age. I had a friend who mf'ing wizard at spreadsheets and vba because she likes what you can do with it. I tried to talk her though just installing an adblocker and newpipe install for better access to youtube and I might as well as have walked outside and started talking to my wood fence to get the same end result. So she drove over and I installed it for her.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#368

Post by stjohnswarts »

rewgs wrote: post #130
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 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…

More to your point. I think TUI/CLI apps would be much more usable if help files where written for Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced (or similar). With the flat format we have now man pages and --help are overwhelming when something is brand new to you.

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#369

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> f I have a rich object in a debugger in Python, I can call dir() on it to immediately see what I can do with it. Whereas if it's a simple dataclass, I'd need to search through code to find how I can use it.

No OOP language can have a search feature as useful as Hoogle:

https://hoogle.haskell.org/?hoogle=%5BMaybe+a%5D+-%3E+%5Ba%5...

Re: You Don't Need a GUI

#370

Post by criddell »

bendiksolheim wrote: post #295
syl_sau wrote: post #270

I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation. Nothing will ever beat the right-clicks or Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combos. It's just more natural to "see" things that you move. Now when it comes to more complex applications, I'd stop using the CLI if I had to search the manpages or the internet each time for doing something I already did previously. Since I d…

> I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation. Nothing will ever beat the right-clicks or Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combos. It's just more natural to "see" things that you move. This might be the case for you, but please don’t mistake it for an objective truth. I find the terminal far superior for file manipulation than any of the graphical file explorers I…

I think this article might be satire because it spends so much time on files. Either that or it was written in 1992.

How many users have an iPhone or iPad as their primary computer? How often are they manipulating files?

Where's the "you don't need a gui" entry for making phone calls, sending messages, playing music, using GPS, etc... While you can certainly do all those things by command line, few people would argue it's a better experience.

Post reply on HN