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Entering text in the terminal is complicated

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Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#151

Post by skydhash »

kragen wrote: post #141
Workaccount2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is passionately what I hate about it. In GUI environments there are check boxes, buttons, menus and english labels for everything. With linux it's like you are copying down a sacred language and presenting it at the alter with your fingers crossed. You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. So now you just cross a…

what would be ideal from my point of view for check boxes, dropdowns, and labels would be if they were a simultaneous alternative view of a command line, or rather a configuration line. an additional simultaneous view would provide a live preview of the result of that line. but you could still type and copy and paste the text interestingly this is not too far from my usual experience with the command line. i want to…

> but yeah having to read the manual and slowly piece together a working command or configuration file is definitely worse than having every option documented in the place where you choose it

That's where domain knowledge comes in. If you don't know anything about networking other than selecting the WiFi network and entering the password, you're going to have a hard time interacting with ip. If you don't know anything about codecs, ffmpeg will seem esoteric.

More often than not, in MacOS and the like, the GUI is reliable and there will be apps for not so common stuff. In Linux, the software (however complex) has already been written in CLI mode and works fine. Someone could do XLD or iTunes, but they're already happy with their ffmpeg scripts, and their MPD setups.

And the key to get there is to usually get a book about Linux at first, then learn about the software you are using.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#152

Post by skydhash »

Waterluvian wrote: post #16
squigz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of the population doesn't need to use the terminal.

If you love cars, popping the hood is probably part of the experience. For everyone else, it’s the sign of a very frustrating day ahead. As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer.

> They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer.

Computers are complex things. Sometimes, things broke and you just can't do the task. But for a knowledgeable person, you just "pop the hood", fix the problem, and then get things done. On My iPad when the Files app freeze, there's nothing to be done other than reboot to get it working again. On Linux, I could pkill a software, restart it in debug mode or go find the logs to know what's wrong. Yes, there's a difference of mindset. But I prefer the "hood" to be there instead of having it be an opaque box.

If you want to get a task done, learn the software that can do it, externalize everything else (IT support). But sometimes, that software is the terminal or it's where the software is.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#153

Post by Workaccount2 »

skydhash wrote: post #135
Workaccount2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used ubuntu for 2 years now, and its the motivation for the post. Ubuntu (or really any distro I am aware of) is great for pensioners (email readers) and power users (career linux user), with a protracted and hellishly complicated experience in between (technologically adept, but lifelong windows user). True, if you just want to fly straight to one of the most popular cities, you can just enter it in the autop…

A better way is to get a book about linux administration (if you want an in-depth manual) or "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward. Then learn bash. Windows is pretty much all GUI (I've left before getting used to Powershell) and that works great until you want to do rules-based changes or do profiles (without using MDM) with changes snapshot. Most software have good manuals so once you've got a bit used to the linux's way…

Trust me, I understand that Linux is all about reading.

I also understand that it is perpetually irrelevant in the consumer computer space, despite everyone in that space absolutely hating the dominate OS. A hate that you can watch grow in virtually real time on any social platform. But that hate is focused on pushing the giant back in-line, not at abandoning that giant for fresh pastures. You know why?

Because 30 years ago, someone who touched grass realized that consumers cannot, let me repeat: cannot, use an OS that is "all about reading".

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#154

Post by xp84 »

rablackburn wrote: post #115
xp84 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what's the big appeal of other terminal apps? I have been using Terminal for 21 years without any issue -- but I'm open to trying something else. Actually I've only this year switched to an "AI enabled" terminal app called Warp.

I’m curious to know what your experience of changing to Warp has been like? Sounds like terminal was working fine for you - was the switch worth the time? I signed up for the waitlist ages ago and finally got the announcement of Linux support in February but am still yet to try it. Mainly because I’ve had a particularly busy year and I can’t justify fiddling around with my stack just for fun. I have no appetite for t…

On Warp: After adjusting a couple of minor settings, I found Warp to be worth it. In fact, I at first trialed it 'side by side,' meaning keeping Terminal.app and Warp both open -- and found myself going for the Warp window more often. So it was an easy call for me.

I chose to not use its custom prompt because I wanted things to be more 'stock' in the terminal and not to rely on an app external to the shell for the features -- the only really fancy prompt feature I have is git branch display, and that's already working fine with my existing zsh prompt.

So, anyway, I can vouch that it didn't try to make changes to my environment (other than that offering to override the prompt, which I think it does in a way that doesn't update your .zshrc/.bashrc file anyway).

And for what it does do, I think it's great. Having command outputs separated and in little scrolling panes, really great. And mouse-able, standard text field to edit commands in, also amazing. Say you have a long URL on the clipboard with a {object_id} variable in the middle. You can paste it in, and use the mouse to select "{object_id}" and replace it instead of using arrow keys etc. to manually delete and replace the variable. So with the above efficiency gains it is already pretty cool compared to any kind of terminal app I knew of.

The AI stuff has been great to have as well. It's really convenient to have free access, right in the terminal, to an LLM that I assume has been well prompted to produce shell or scripting code as requested.

One thing I turned off is their recent "Detect natural language automatically" feature. Before, if you wanted to invoke AI, you just did a #comment. So for instance "# docker command to remove exited containers" -- well, they updated it so that even without that "#" it should "just know" from inspecting the command. But I had a problem with it getting confused by a shell command that was also parseable as 2 English words. I think I prefer actually knowing whether I'm commanding a shell or operating an LLM, anyway.

BTW - it occurs to me that there are also big categories of features that it has which I don't even use, such as like, runbooks that can automate frequently-done tasks, things like that. Those may also factor into your decision.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#155

Post by Workaccount2 »

kragen wrote: post #141
Workaccount2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is passionately what I hate about it. In GUI environments there are check boxes, buttons, menus and english labels for everything. With linux it's like you are copying down a sacred language and presenting it at the alter with your fingers crossed. You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. So now you just cross a…

what would be ideal from my point of view for check boxes, dropdowns, and labels would be if they were a simultaneous alternative view of a command line, or rather a configuration line. an additional simultaneous view would provide a live preview of the result of that line. but you could still type and copy and paste the text interestingly this is not too far from my usual experience with the command line. i want to…

Trust me man, I know a few Concorde pilots and they sit in that cockpit and flip switches and the spin the controls such that the plane will glide like butter through a hurricane - while myself here is practically crash landing at every stop.

There is the chronic issue with skilled linux users where they keep flexing how good the terminal is (and lets be honest: flexing their fluidity and dexterity with it too) while completely missing the forest for the trees. The terminal sucks because it is difficult to use with an arduous learning curve.

There is a reason why Android, the most successful linux "distro" to the point at the summation of others is a rounding error, has no user terminal and a robust GUI. People don't even know it's linux. Thats what we need; an opensource linux distro that people don't even know is linux.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#156

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

xg15 wrote: post #21

> First, there’s “the baseline” – what happens if a program just accepts text by calling fgets() or whatever and doing absolutely nothing else to provide a nicer experience. [...] there are actually a few features that you get for free just from your terminal, without the program needing to do anything special at all. The things you get for free are: [...] - backspace - Ctrl+W, to delete the previous word - Ctrl+U, t…

One of the first challenges I faced as someone who got paid to program: port the VMS "help" program to SunOS (a *nix). Initial challenge: how to respond to each keystroke rather than wait for enter/return. My boss was intentionally unhelpful and forced me to figure it out more or less all by myself (remember: no web, and hardly any O'Reilly books in 1986). I remain eternally grateful for his judgement to this day.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#157

Post by xp84 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #126
xp84 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most insightful post in the thread -- there's definitely a false dichotomy here. It's not "have to use a terminal" vs "everything works without a need for a terminal ever" -- it's "able to use a terminal to accomplish some goal or recover from Really Bad Thing" vs "Can't Do That Thing / have to factory restore to recover". Like the way Apple Maps on my iPhone can't save the person to notify when I navigat…

In general, Apple would solve that problem by recommending you plug an Apple computer into an Apple monitor. The Apple ecosystem is well incentivized to make all of their pieces work with their other pieces. The Windows ecosystem is pretty decently incentivized to make things work together in general (In both directions... Windows suffers in sales if there's some popular hardware it won't work with, and popular hardw…

How does the monitor thing relate to what I was saying? In my case, I'm saying that Apple's tightly-coupled, app-OS-cloud integration means I have no ability to see what's wrong (and I'm positive the minimum wage phone support guys will not be able to escalate a bug like that to Engineering and get it fixed). My point was even first-party walled garden stuff doesn't work right, and having no access beneath the GUI rules out anyone outside being able to fix it. I get your point though that the 'right person' who could use that access to more obscure things may be rare anyways.

Re: Entering text in the terminal is complicated

#158

Post by arp242 »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #98
jorams wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what terminal that is, because the Home and End keys, which I'm pretty sure are the expected alternatives, work fine in every terminal for me on Linux.

I feel like you're being willfully obtuse here. I can't remember the last time I used a laptop which had Home / End keys. Edit: actually I do remember -- it was an HP ProBook from 2011.

Almost every (Windows) laptop has them, although they do all use their own unique (IMHO often awkward) layout.
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