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

The Command Line Challenge.

blog.chavezgu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#21

Post by dredmorbius »

enneff wrote: post #6

More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.

Actually, more and more of the text-mode / console browsers have graphical support.

The real challenge these days is javascript. I'm not aware of a text-mode browser that interprets javascript.

I'd also like to give a plug for w3m. It's far more user-friendly than lynx, and IMO more advanced than elinks.

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#22

Post by newman314 »

Honestly, I'm going to fall back on right tool for the right task.

I just happen to be able to get a lot done using a terminal. However, that does not mean I want to be doing something Excel-ish in anything but Excel.

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#25

Post by chalst »

enneff wrote: post #6

More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.

Agreed.

I think we can be more purist still: menu-driven UIs are not really command line either. MH has a truly command-line UI for mail, while the mail program doesn't.

Some years back, I spent a couple of days trying to use ed for some serious text preparation work before I decided this was not the kind of experiment one should do when better tools are available and real work needs to be done. Using nmh (an MH reimplementation) used to be a pleasure, until its clumsy handling of HTML (quite a bit worse than mutt) began to overwhelm the whole user experience.

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#26

Post by DanBC »

ocivelek wrote: post #18

CLI is great from *NIX perspective and I believe most of us had used it extensively in the past. I still use CLI but if and only if it suits as the best tool for the problem I'm working on. The fact is, that the paradigm has changed, therefore the way we interact with our computing devices. IMHO, bigotry is not only bad in politics. We have to embrace the change, learn new tools, improve, share our knowledge and not…

You point out that you're familiar with the command line, thus this article isn't really for you.

For people who haven't used CLI before; or who don't have much experience of the command line: it makes some things about the Unix way a bit clearer. One program does one task, but does it well. You pass the output from one command into the input of another. Input and output are text, because text is universal.

These are important powerful concepts and I'm disappointed that they've largely been forgotten in the GUI world.

I'm also baffled that my vastly powerful computer has areas of lagginess when grinding through some seemingly trivial things. A pure-CLI trivially-easy-to-install distro[1] isn't going to happen, but imagine the use people could get from all those old computers which are not coping with modern OSs.

[1] Linux from scratch definitely does not count. TinyCore doesn't really count. Arch sort of comes close, but would need to be i) Much easier to install and ii) have a specific repository for CLI / Curses / etc software.

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#27

Post by klez »

koningrobot wrote: post #20
derleth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) I'd say the keyboard-centricness still separates them from, say, Eclipse.

For those looking for a keyboard-driven browser, try http://conkeror.org/

or http://uzbl.org

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#28

Post by unicron »

sliverstorm wrote: post #11

My (unintentional) Command Line Challenge was trying to build Gentoo on a 100MHz laptop with no other computers around. That was about 2 days of compute work. At the time, it didn't compile reliably either, so emerge would crash 5-10 times while trying to get to Xorg. Learning to fix the problems, particularly via lynx, brought me up to speed more quickly than anything else. Something to be said for leaning by immers…

Similar!

I was using Debian on a compaq dual 200MHz Pentium Pro desktop until about '02. I was pretty much 100% of the time on the shell so I really didn't need anything more.

Mutt for email, irssi for IRC, links for browser, vi for the editor and a 512k ADSL connection. That was about it.

The whole machine cost me 10GBP (about $15). It replaced an old Sun machine I found in a skip in 1997.

I bought my first new computer in 2004 :)

The console rocks.

Re: The Command Line Challenge.

#30

Post by klez »

ocivelek wrote: post #18

CLI is great from *NIX perspective and I believe most of us had used it extensively in the past. I still use CLI but if and only if it suits as the best tool for the problem I'm working on. The fact is, that the paradigm has changed, therefore the way we interact with our computing devices. IMHO, bigotry is not only bad in politics. We have to embrace the change, learn new tools, improve, share our knowledge and not…

Until you screw your X configuration very badly.

For this exact reason, in my first experiences with GNU/Linux, I reinstalled the distro every time X was screwed.

Post reply on HN