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Heh, the "you don't need GUI" one is extremely underwhelming. Anybody who knows what terminal is already knows about all those commands and none of them is easi
by yoz-y 10y ago
Heh, the "you don't need GUI" one is extremely underwhelming. Anybody who knows what terminal is already knows about all those commands and none of them is easier than a GUI. It could make more impact if it actually explained tasks that are harder to do in GUI than in the command line, such as massive renaming of the files, filtering files depending on content and so on.
- flukus 10y agoOr it could just have a last item of "all of these commands are combinable, scriptable and repeatable".
- notgood 10y agoI have always dream of hybrid software, meaning GUIs which show in real time the CLI equivalent of each one of your actions on the GUI, so later on everything you did in the GUI is combinable/scriptable, etc
- flukus 10y agoDoesn't apple have something like that? Either way, I think log files of actions taken are much more debuggable than watching a computer control the gui.
- iainmerrick 10y agoYes, AppleScript did this way back in the pre-OS X days -- but only if you added Apple Events support to your app, which was extremely fiddly and tedious. Their current tool Automator is supposed to do this, but I don't know how widely it's supported. I suspect just like everything else, it has niche of users who love it and depend on it. It's not something your typical Mac user would think to reach for.
- omribahumi 10y agoIs macro recording (and editing) still a thing? I haven't used MS Office in a while...
- voltagex_ 10y agoI've seen a few ffmpeg GUIs that show you the exact command that will be executed. nmap's Zenmap also shows you the command it's using.
- ioseph 10y agoMost SQL GUI's do this, same for git wrappers
- notgood 10y agoCool, although when I think about this I usually imagine it on Photoshop and similar apps, and later on using such commands from python or something.
- adiabatty 10y agoSounds like macro recording in Office. You'd start recording, do some things, stop recording, and then you could see the VB code you generated and could edit it.
- anthk 10y agoSmallTalk
- pjc50 10y agoI think AutoCAD does this? I actually built one of these hybrids for a piece of chip design software, where scripting is very much expected. Architectural bonuses were that it was almost like having a GUI microservice; it could iterate separately, be written in a different language, and crash separately too.
- galfarragem 10y agoIt does. I don't know any professional user that doesn't use the CLI. (I'm an architect). I still dream with the day that Photoshop gets one also..
- yoz-y 10y agoI am not criticising then CLI, but the actual repo which feels like the first class in first year of CS. cp, ls, stat, zip... nom much you can repeat or compose there.
- delinka 10y ago"...none of them is easier..." Subjective. However, if you can type at a reasonable speed, the terminal is faster than moving a mouse around. Now, GUI makes more sense for many things. Kinda hard to edit video without a GUI (but if someone has a command-line-driven video rendering editor, let me know - I want to explore this.) Visual programming wouldn't be 'visual' without GUI.
- astrange 10y ago> if someone has a command-line-driven video rendering editor, let me know - I want to explore this. There is a linear editor called AviSynth that's relatively popular and very Windows-based.
- Retra 10y agoNah, it's (type + remember) speed that makes command lines frustrating. They're only fast if you use them constantly or write scripts. As soon as you have to look up an argument order or a command flag, you've lost all that efficiency.
- omribahumi 10y agoBash completion is still pretty fast for most commands. If you need --help or man, it will slow you down considerably
- 10y ago
- wruza 10y agoGui sucks each time you write '|' in the shell prompt.
- psiclops 10y agopipes are amazing though
- kafkaesq 10y agoDisagree. One of the most generally applicable practices to learn as a developer is the ability to use CLIs effectively, for tasks to which they area best suited. Which is the great bulk of them (version control, database admin, most filesys manipulation, etc). Or to address your point more directly: for many tasks the GUI may seem easier at first, but a modest investment in CLI techniques can yield far greater dividends, over time. And then there's all the conceptual and dependency bloat that GUIs impose on a project, over time.
- mattmanser 10y agoGUIs are about showing what you can do. CLIs are about memorizing what you can do. One suits computers and the tiny amount of population with aspergers, the other suits normal people.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThe tasks I was referring to are clearly developer-centric tasks. Applications for "normal people" are an entirely different animal of course.
- flukus 10y agoKind of funny that we have initiatives like "everyone should be a programmer" but then we don't even trust "normal people" to learn how to use a CLI.
- kafkaesq 10y agoI think the key distinction is between different kinds of tasks (and importantly, the scale on which those tasks are done) rather than different kinds of people.
- mattmanser 10y agoI'm a developer and a normal person. CLIs are idiotic. Why can't you just click a button and be done, certainly not sit there and spend 20 minutes figuring out what the fuck -g means or if knockut-sortable is missing an o. It's utterly ridiculous that you're discussing this and just shows how many of you are utterly brainwashed by utterly useless trivia that your computer should be memorising for you but your fellow programmers are too lazy to implement GUIs for. I honestly can't comprehend that you so gleefully spend your time so pointlessly, you should be spending your brains on solving actual life and business problems, not memorising the syntax of CLIs you'll use once every 3 months, or worse still, never again, or virtually useless regex syntax.
- analog31 10y agoI use both CLI and GUI, but here's an area where I think the CLI just rocks: Instructions for installing and configuring software. Typical instructions for Linux: sudo apt-get install foo sudo apt-get install bar cd ~/somewhere sudo nano something, change these lines The same instructions for Windows involves screen after screen of text interspersed with annotated pictures of dialogs, which become obsolete when the OS is revised. In fact, I've seen an increasing number of Windows installation tips being given in CLI terms: windows+R cmd enter this command It would be interesting to see some sort of tool, online or within the system, where you enter a command string and it explains what the command does.
- nightski 10y agoI'd argue that has more to do with a unified package manager and installation process than GUI vs. CLI.
- tzakrajs 10y agoAnd I argue it has more to with the fact that *nix applications are traditionally configured via static configuration files as opposed to interactive process.
- ams6110 10y agoThe real benefit is that they are configured with text files, not a monolithic inscrutable system "registry."
- enraged_camel 10y agoThis is about how the user interacts with the configuration process, not where the configuration variables are stored.
- flukus 10y agoI'd argue it's because it's a lot simpler to to explain than "start synaptic, got to the search box and type x, click the install button, etc".
- Ph0X 10y agoSo is the "You Don't Need Javascript (css is powerful enough)" one. Most of those were cool proof of concept demos made in CSS with no JS. One of them was just a straight up game... I don't see how any of that is actually useful, other than being kinda cool. I was hoping for actual small common cases where people use JS to do something that's super easy with CSS, like animations.
- joseluis 10y agoI'm greatly underwhelmed on that one because there is zero information about the compatibility of those solutions, the pros and cons, the most appropriate use cases, etc. They're just demos without context.