Life is too short for a slow terminal
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Life is too short for a slow terminal
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#2[flagged]
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#3[flagged]
Depends on what you grew up on/learned I think. CLI was the only thing around when I learned so that's still what I prefer. It's one of those things where I think you use the tool that you are proficient with. No right or wrong, just different strokes for different folks.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#4[flagged]
In a Turing machine theory, a GUI application can do all the same things a terminal application can do.
In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to "muscle memory" whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately always [1]).
Keyboard oriented applications feel more like a language and human brains tend to map well to language and touch typing while GUI's rely on something akin (or identical) to hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is harder than touch typing and every GUI application requires developing a unique mental model.
[1] in the ancient days of digitizing tablets with absolute coordinates, it was possible to "touch mouse." But that's not how we do things today (and it would not work well with infinite scrolling, etc.)
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#5[flagged]
In a Turing machine theory, a GUI application can do all the same things a terminal application can do. In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to "muscle memory" whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately…
I happily used a small Wacom graphics tablet as a mouse for a long time. Thanks for the memories, I’d nearly forgotten.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#6[flagged]
Terminal tools are nice because keyboard shortcuts and text commands are quicker than clicking through menus and pressing buttons. For certain types of work (programming for example) this is much quicker and more comfortable than GUI interfaces.
Of course, other tasks are nicer with a GUI and/or mouse/tablet/touchscreen (art creation for example).
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#7[flagged]
"gui"? what gui?
my take is terminal is just quicker than "gui".
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#8[flagged]
All other things being equal, GUI apps are not usually composable - the unix philosophy lets you do a lot by not solving every problem yourself.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#9[flagged]
If you haven't combined terminal tools together then you haven't use the terminal the way it's intended.
If you start 1 command and get 1 output, the terminal isn't particularly powerful.
One you do start combining commands then it's a totally different thing.
If your GUI does everything you need, then a terminal isn't necessarily useful. If your GUI doesn't provide a feature though, you are most likely stuck. You might be able to learn it's own API in a specific language, e.g. Lisp for Gimp, Python for Blender, etc. If though your terminal application doesn't provide what you need you can pipe its output to another terminal application and thus get something that none of those applications individual can. Once you have done it with 2 applications you can do that with 3, 4, etc. You can label those applications and re-use that tomorrow, share with someone else, etc.
The terminal isn't about starting one application.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#10[flagged]
GUIs are almost entirely non-scriptable. Some exceptions exist, but they're few and extremely limited compared to what you can do with a CLI. (Note I said CLI. A TUI is almost always a GUI made of text, and is just as non-scriptable.)