The closest CLI style interaction in a GUI is the Jupyter Notebook interface that combines code and documentation.
This could easily be used to document complex reusable command sequences.
CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
71–80 of 126 posts
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui. There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are comp…
> GUIs are deeply nested. And context sensitive so it may not even be possible to see actions until certain condition is met. This is a feature, not a bug. For me, browsing 20 pages of --help or man is a discoverability nightmare. I don't want to wade through arcane option after arcane argument. The GUI gives me a well-organized top-level understanding of the program: organized menus, and organized panes (panels/pale…
Same reason I stay away from text books and stick to picture books and comics! Text is boring and tedious, pictures are cute and fun!
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#73I have great respect for consistent and coherent CLI interfaces. The first piece of software I released was a command line app. I put a lot of time into designing the interface before I wrote any code.
I “designed” the commands (the grammar, collected terms, syntax and semantics, etc.) before implementing them. The goal was to provide a “guessable” interface, eg. if you ‘load’ then it makes sense to ‘unload’.
Next time I do something graphical, I’d like to design a scriptable CLI interface first, then use end/entry-points to build the GUI.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. Badly made GUIs are. I started my career developing desktop software. Both Apple and Microsoft used to publish guides for building proper GUIs for their platforms. Our UX designers and PMs were enforcing those vigorously. On Windows, every feature had to be represented in the menu of the main window. See, right there, by going (not even clicking on) every menu item you will lea…
> Badly made GUIs are. So pretty much every browser out there? Without knowing ahead of time from random pilfering through various menus, how can you tell if your browser is up-to-date or not? How do you find the extensions page? Or is it add-ons? Depends, I guess. How do I figure out which tab of (potentially) hundreds is consuming CPU and memory? I won't claim that CLIs are better, but GUIs are definitely not made…
I blame Chrome pissing on the menus for how hidden most functions are. Once they hid the menus, the others fell in line.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#75The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. Looking at Docker CLI, there are like a bazillion commands and it takes forever to read through the docs to find out what exactly to use. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…
GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui. There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are comp…
Yes. This. Man And help pages are great (and grep-able, ripgrep-able ha).
No ads. No pay wall. Damn I love man pages.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#76The biggest problem with CLI is discoverability as the article points out. Looking at Docker CLI, there are like a bazillion commands and it takes forever to read through the docs to find out what exactly to use. Furthermore, there are some commands that depend on the others being there - that breaks the composability. Back to discoverability, is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable"? Reading the man page doesn…
GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui. There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are comp…
Tab completion really helps with that
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui. There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are comp…
Yep. CLIs often also have a predictable interface. (Help is almost always -h or --help, version info is -v or --version, etc). On a GUI you'll have to play around a bit more and search for functionality.
Half the time, -v seems to be a shortcut for --verbose. Or is it -V? Either way, it's not consistent or very predictable.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. I've always found --help (or help for tools breakin the "standard") and man pages massively more discoverable than any gui. There are two well known entry points "--help" and "man". There has been much convention standardization with operating system guis, still they have many, many possible entry points. not all programs use same ones, use in same way. And webapps/pages are comp…
Not to mention that GUI designers have a penchant for moving things around in the interface on every release. So even if you knew where that thing was, you don't necessary know now . Consider Microsoft Office, for example. Ugh.
Microsoft Office has barely changed since Office 2007 and the introduction of the Ribbon. They screwed up the File menu by making it full-screen†, but apart from that I can't see anything to complain about.
† The original 2007 "Office" menu like in File Explorer or Paint is loads better.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hundreds of millions of people that use excel with limited to no training would likely beg to differ with the proposition that it isn’t discoverable. I’ve never taken an excel class or read basic excel docs, yet I know how to do basic excel things. That’s literally impossible in a CLI. Similarly, how many people have trouble saving and quitting a word document? What about vim?
I have trouble saving a word document nowadays, since they close the document when you want to save or print. (You press file, and now the document has been closed and replaced by some menu. I do not know if my actions will apply to the document that I had had open before the program helpfully closed it and makes me feel very uncertain. I do not like to use Word for this reason. It is completely unfathomable to me wh…
The File menu doesn't close the document, it just covers it. That's why it's terrible, and I don't know why they ever introduced it when Word 2007 already had a perfect solution. Word 2007 had a small menu exactly like File Explorer and Paint that was actually usable and didn't change the context.
Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GUIs are deeply nested. And context sensitive so it may not even be possible to see actions until certain condition is met. This is a feature, not a bug. For me, browsing 20 pages of --help or man is a discoverability nightmare. I don't want to wade through arcane option after arcane argument. The GUI gives me a well-organized top-level understanding of the program: organized menus, and organized panes (panels/pale…
Same reason I stay away from text books and stick to picture books and comics! Text is boring and tedious, pictures are cute and fun!
Don't think this is a fair comparison. You can drill down quickly to learn new actions you didn't know before in a GUI. That's a whole lot harder to do in a CLI