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Just Use Curl

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Re: Just Use Curl

#151

Post by cosmotic »

cassianoleal wrote: post #142
cosmotic wrote: post #124

The author could benefit from some research into user centered design. CLI is notorious for poor discoverability and consistency, two halmarks of GUI (at least 20 years ago; these days less focus is put on these elements). Humans are very not good at remembering command line flags but great at looking at then manipulating a screen that shows fields for all the flags.

That may be true for a tool that's not used often. For professional tooling, muscle memory and response time beat discoverability any day of the week. GUIs are (usually) slow and break the flow. They cater for the bottom of the pile of users, in detriment of the top.

How is muscle memory an exclusive benefit of CLI? How is response time superior for a CLI? I've used GUI tools for git professionally for years and it seems much faster, safer, and easier to use. I've had peers that use CLI instead and they appear to struggle for all the expected reasons (poor feedback, poor discoverability, etc).

Re: Just Use Curl

#152

Post by cassianoleal »

cosmotic wrote: post #151
cassianoleal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true for a tool that's not used often. For professional tooling, muscle memory and response time beat discoverability any day of the week. GUIs are (usually) slow and break the flow. They cater for the bottom of the pile of users, in detriment of the top.

How is muscle memory an exclusive benefit of CLI? How is response time superior for a CLI? I've used GUI tools for git professionally for years and it seems much faster, safer, and easier to use. I've had peers that use CLI instead and they appear to struggle for all the expected reasons (poor feedback, poor discoverability, etc).

Git is an interesting example.

I have a few commands and one-liners that perform certain tasks. I can chain them together without looking at the screen. In fact, I can be reading code on the editor while I perform them on the terminal from muscle memory alone. I build a mental model of the branch I'm working on and how it relates to trunk and work from there. Each command updates that mental model. A GUI will never be as fast as that.

Now, you're right - a GUI that can be fully navigated with the keyboard can get somewhat close. That is, until an update changes the place of a button, or the organisation of a menu. CLIs almost universally have stable contracts with the user.

Don't get me wrong, I like GUIs for a lot of tasks: web browsing, CAD work, even programming. I just find that "everything should be a GUI" only serves to bring top performers down closer to the mean at best.

Furthermore, a crappy CLI is really only crappy until muscle memory sets in. A crappy GUI generally remains a crappy experience for as long as it's used.

Is muscle memory an exclusive benefit of CLI? No, but it's am universal benefit of the CLI, whereas it's only incidental on GUIs.

Re: Just Use Curl

#153

Post by johnisgood »

Izkata wrote: post #146
humlex wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i do is assign the token to a variable. I typically copy the secret to my clipboard, and then use the pbpaste command in macos terminal when assigning it to avoid secrets in my command history.

I don't know how consistent this is across shells, but at least in bash putting a space before the command keeps it out of the history: $ ONE=1 $ TWO=2 $ echo $ONE $TWO 1 2 $ history | tail -n 4 2002 clear 2003 ONE=1 2004 echo $ONE $TWO 2005 history | tail -n 4

Yeah, I have been using this feature of bash ever since its existence and it is quite handy at times, especially when I do "printf "" | qr".

Re: Just Use Curl

#154

Post by cosmotic »

cassianoleal wrote: post #152
cosmotic wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is muscle memory an exclusive benefit of CLI? How is response time superior for a CLI? I've used GUI tools for git professionally for years and it seems much faster, safer, and easier to use. I've had peers that use CLI instead and they appear to struggle for all the expected reasons (poor feedback, poor discoverability, etc).

Git is an interesting example. I have a few commands and one-liners that perform certain tasks. I can chain them together without looking at the screen. In fact, I can be reading code on the editor while I perform them on the terminal from muscle memory alone. I build a mental model of the branch I'm working on and how it relates to trunk and work from there. Each command updates that mental model. A GUI will never b…

In my experience, a GUI can chain command together for you and invoke them instantly or automatically, no typing, no looking. It would really help to understand what tasks you're doing that you feel CLI excels. They're certainly git commands GUIs handle poorly, but they are usually arcane and infrequently invoked. I'd hope you'd agree there are cases where the GUI excels.
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