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

CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

expressionsofchange.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 126 posts

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#81

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

njharman wrote: post #17
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The 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…

You call a flat list with a thousand items of tiny text discoverable?

It’s not.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#82

Post by downerending »

a1369209993 wrote: post #63
downerending wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, I recall that fondly. On the other hand, a modern Linux box might have thousands of commands, and I'm not sure that VMS HELP could handle that well.

It sounds almost exactly like the unix (1)man command actually, and, well: $ ls /usr/share/man/man1/ | wc -l 2997 I'd say that qualifies as thousands (plural).

The difference, as I recall it (and it's been decades), is that VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Unix has things like 'man -k', but those ultimately output into a pager, which is well-designed to deal with quite long lists.

I do miss HELP and EDT, but they're hopelessly outmatched by modern tools.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#83

Post by downerending »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #78
downerending wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It could be that the interface is so confusing and horrible that it only seems different each time I dig into it.

Each time I take a new job, I have to slog around in the config screens trying to figure out how to turn off all of Outlook's !@#$ing awful "corrections" that send my email in variable-width fonts and change my '--' strings into em dashes and so on, thereby destroying my emails to users. Every time I do this, it seems like the layout of this awful pile of config dialogs has rearranged itself. Is it just PTSD?

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#84

Post by frosted-flakes »

downerending wrote: post #83
frosted-flakes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It could be that the interface is so confusing and horrible that it only seems different each time I dig into it. Each time I take a new job, I have to slog around in the config screens trying to figure out how to turn off all of Outlook's !@#$ing awful "corrections" that send my email in variable-width fonts and change my '--' strings into em dashes and so on, thereby destroying my emails to users. Every time I do t…

Yeah, well, Outlook is a different story. The Ribbon interface isn't really suited to a mail client, and Outlook has so much historical baggage that makes it ridiculously hard to use. I try my best to not use it, so I don't know how much it's changed.

But Word, PowerPoint, and to some extent, Excel? The Ribbon is really well thought-out and easy to use. It feels intuitive in a way that the old bloated menus never did. And the command search feature is actually really useful, and teaches you where a command is located so you can just go straight there next time.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#85

Post by millimeterman »

falcolas wrote: post #62
old-gregg wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

Counterpoint: the vast, vast majority of users never do any of that. I’m sure Google collects tons of analytics on how people use Chrome and the current design is tailored to fit the needs of the majority. Common functions like tabs, the address bar, and maybe bookmarks are front and center while everything is shoved into menus to declutter the top-level UI.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#86

Post by a1369209993 »

downerending wrote: post #82
a1369209993 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds almost exactly like the unix (1)man command actually, and, well: $ ls /usr/share/man/man1/ | wc -l 2997 I'd say that qualifies as thousands (plural).

The difference, as I recall it (and it's been decades), is that VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter. Unix has things like 'man -k', but those ultimately output into a pager, which is well-designed to deal with quite long lists. I do miss HELP and EDT, but they're hopelessly outmatched by modern tools.

> VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Ah, yes, point. I was more pointing out that it's possible to "handle that well" (or at least not terribly; unix is like democracy), rather than any disagreement over how well HELP itself handled it in practice.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#87

Post by tfehring »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #4
fermienrico wrote: post #3

The 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…

I find CLIs to be more discoverable -- tab completion, help text, etc. represents a (relatively) standardized form of discovery. GUIs on the other hand may have cryptic icons, be arranged differently from each other, and have various hidden functionalities. I'm not saying we can't make CLIs more discoverable, but I simply hold the opposite opinion: They already win out over GUIs on discoverability. I think they lose…

None of the features of CLIs that you described qualify as discoverability IMO. Tab completion, etc. only work if you know the name of the command that you need, and few to no CLI utilities or commands are named well.

Say you need to remove duplicates from a list, for example. If you happen to know that the utility to do that is called `uniq` then it's useful that you can use `man uniq` to see the available options, but if you don't already know the name of the utility you're looking for, you're stuck Googling for it. (The name `uniq` isn't obvious but at least it's intuitive. For the many commands that are neither obvious nor intuitive, good luck.)

Compare that to, say, Excel, where if you press Alt,A to bring up the Data tab there's a nice, big button labeled Remove Duplicates, with an M on it to indicate that the full keystroke sequence for that command is Alt,A,M (fewer keystrokes than ` | uniq` even with tab completion, for what that's worth). So in addition to accessibility, there's also discoverability.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#88

Post by downerending »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #84
downerending wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that the interface is so confusing and horrible that it only seems different each time I dig into it. Each time I take a new job, I have to slog around in the config screens trying to figure out how to turn off all of Outlook's !@#$ing awful "corrections" that send my email in variable-width fonts and change my '--' strings into em dashes and so on, thereby destroying my emails to users. Every time I do t…

Yeah, well, Outlook is a different story. The Ribbon interface isn't really suited to a mail client, and Outlook has so much historical baggage that makes it ridiculously hard to use. I try my best to not use it, so I don't know how much it's changed. But Word, PowerPoint, and to some extent, Excel? The Ribbon is really well thought-out and easy to use. It feels intuitive in a way that the old bloated menus never did…

This is hopelessly pedantic, but Outlook is (now) part of Microsoft Office. And matters to me the most since it's the only part of Office I hardly ever use.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#89

Post by frosted-flakes »

downerending wrote: post #88
frosted-flakes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well, Outlook is a different story. The Ribbon interface isn't really suited to a mail client, and Outlook has so much historical baggage that makes it ridiculously hard to use. I try my best to not use it, so I don't know how much it's changed. But Word, PowerPoint, and to some extent, Excel? The Ribbon is really well thought-out and easy to use. It feels intuitive in a way that the old bloated menus never did…

This is hopelessly pedantic, but Outlook is (now) part of Microsoft Office. And matters to me the most since it's the only part of Office I hardly ever use.

Not hopelessly pedantic, it's very true. It's just that I've always hated Outlook and I'd honestly forgotten about it when I wrote that original comment.

Re: CLIs are reified UIs (2017)

#90

Post by nerdponx »

pritambaral wrote: post #34
nerdponx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a way to make CLI "more discoverable" I've thought about this a lot. The answer, I think, is to have a "reverse index" of tasks that you can do with the tool and their corresponding commands or recipes. For example, man pages are typically organized alphabetically by option or subcommand. I'm envisioning a section of documentation - maybe a separate man page or just something on a website - that looks like t…

Isn't that just the EXAMPLES section of a man page?

Sort of? Most "examples" are just scattershot random functionality that the author deemed important, with little consideration for actual use. GNU Parallel is a notable exception, albeit a somewhat disorganized one.
Post reply on HN