7 ms·

Coming from Linux/macOS, PuTTY was one of the things that always drove me bonkers. So much clicking to change settings. So many times I was uncertain about w

Coming from Linux/macOS, PuTTY was one of the things that always drove me bonkers. So much clicking to change settings. So many times I was uncertain about whether I'd edited or saved the right session. I'm trying out Windows again, and the whole environment seems to have massively improved in the four years since I last played with it: after installing bash for windows and docker for windows and openssh through scoop, I can open a command line and use native ssh, or type "bash" and use the usual Linux version, or "docker run ..." and use whatever I'm used to there. Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool?

tokenizerrr 10y ago
> Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool? You're clearly a Linux person. Or at least a command line person. I am too. Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever. They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand. So, my point is, there are a lot of people who have used GUIs their entire life and are used to be able to figure things out by just staring at the GUI and spending 30 minutes aimlessly clicking about. Then when they use a CLI program they have no idea what to do, and get frustrated. Because they're not used to RTFM.
- bytelayer 10y ago
  What's wrong with GitHub Desktop? Just enter your commit message and click "Sync". Much easier than using the command line.
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    We don't use GitHub and looking at https://desktop.github.com/ https://desktop.github.com/ it's not a Git client, but a GitHub client.
    - Rafert 10y ago
      It's a git client: https://help.github.com/desktop/faq/articles/do-you-support-hosts-other-than-github/ https://help.github.com/desktop/faq/articles/do-you-support-...
      - tokenizerrr 10y ago
        Ah ok, I'll let my Eclipse Git coworkers know about this. Shame there isn't a Linux version or I could give it a go myself to see how it compares. I assume it does branching well.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    I recommend GitHub Desktop to most of my coworkers that come to me with git problems. It's nice in that it also installs a command line version of git that I use with Powershell. In that sense it is useful because they can grow into power users should the need arise.
- k__ 10y ago
  I found it even strange for a Windows app. Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started.
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    > Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started. Of all things, I don't think that is a bad design choice. I would get really annoyed if all the changes I've made in the different tabs were to disappear because I happened to click on one of the already existing sessions in the list. Perhaps because I'd want to update it.
- egeozcan 10y ago
  We wanted to switch to Git from Mercurial because we wanted something like Gitlab. The only reason we didn't was that there wasn't any app for Git which was as user-friendly as TortoiseHg.
  - sk5t 10y ago
    Tower is quite nice, in late beta for Windows.
    - egeozcan 10y ago
      This looks even cleaner than TortoiseHg and that's an achievement! Thank you. I guess it wasn't available when we first looked.
  - efraim 10y ago
    Have a look at Gitkraken - https://www.gitkraken.com/features https://www.gitkraken.com/features
  - WayneBro 10y ago
    There is TortoiseGit!
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      Which pales in comparison to the multi-platform goodness of TortoiseHg since it is an independent creation designed from the ground up for the distributed workflow rather than a reworked TortoiseSVN. I wish someone would do a Git conversion of THG.
      - WayneBro 10y ago
        Besides not being cross platform, how does it pale in comparison? I've been using it for over five years and I can't imagine what it could possibly be missing...
    - Too 10y ago
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  I use the command line for the majority of my day and I still use a Git GUI (Tower for Mac) because in one single window I have all my repositories traversable, I can instantly see what is changing, and get a diff of a file in one click without leaving the window. For any commit/merge/push/pull standard maneuvers (probably 99.8%) I do, Tower is faster. Anything 'complicated' and I'm using git in the command line. But I do agree about the Eclipse git client. It's the worst client I think I have ever seen. Every dev I know that relies on it regularly finds away to bork their local version or to screw up the central repository on a regular enough basis that it's not even a surprise anymore.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
  How can you survive as a developer without at least passing familiarity with the command line? This is worrisome indeed.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  >Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever. >They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand. I still find it hard to believe that there are people like this out there. You're a programmer! You write in programming languages all day, but you think at a new language, a relatively simple one used by thousands of people who aren't professional programmers, will be hard to learn. I guess Steve Yegge was right. Programmers really do hate learning new languages.
  - wott 10y ago
    There are many people who are completely lost without an IDE, or even without their IDE. Some of them have no idea of what is going on underneath. It is not rare to read such people around here.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      That's... terrifying. I mean, I am often in awe of my own staggering ignorance, but at least I'm doing something about it. I hazily know how CPUs work (more or less), I understand why cache misses matter (now: thanks HN). I understand the basics of Big O, what kinds of functions are computable, and why O(n^2) or O(n!) is really bad. I know some common algorithms for simple problems, and I know how to recognize the Travelling Salesman when I see it. That's not all that I know, not by a long shot, but I know that what I know is a tiny drop in the ocean of what I don't. It's just baffling that there are people out there, likely older than me, who aren't actively trying to learn more. I mean, if you don't like computing enough to be motivated to learn more about it, why are you in the industry?
  - oblio 10y ago
    Those people are the majority (or at least a large plurality). Quit your job as a game dev/web dev at a large software vendor/startup and join the enterprise Java/.NET devs working on middleware and be amazed at how scared they are of anything outside of the IDE.
- mastazi 10y ago
  At work there are a few devs like that. I should specify that they are really good developers, and they are certainly able to work "the Linux way" if they have to, it's just that they are more comfortable using GUIs and "fat" IDEs rather than a CLI + a "lean" text editor. Still, I am convinced that, for advanced users, CLI wins over GUI. Even outside of the sw dev world, I see many professionals (e.g. graphic designers) who, in order to increase productivity, learn so many keyboard shortcuts that they end up using their keyboard more than their mouse: in my mind, I see that as a "CLI-zation" of the GUI. Another point is ease of sharing: with CLI-based work-flows, you can just write down everything in the company wiki, all is just text. The thought of having to take screenshots in order to describe a work-flow to a colleague (vs. just writing down commands) drives me mad.
weazl 10y ago
> Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool? For me it's the easily clickable URLs. Copying and pasting URLs in other CLI-environments on Windows is cumbersome at best.
WayneBro 10y ago
It's never been clear to me why anyone would want to use a completely opaque and undiscoverable interface such as a commandline over a nice GUI for anything. You didn't have to read anything or search around in order to change all of those settings in the GUI. If I were just transferring files or editing files remotely I would use WinSCP which has a much better interface than PuTTY. I can't stand browsing files through the commandline on any OS... It's so tedious. Also, you can operate the entirety of Windows with just the keyboard. You don't even have to pick up the mouse at all. The Tab and Enter keys get you pretty far without even having to know anything special.
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Scriptability is just as important as discoverability. I don't feel like constantly clicking to accomplish the same task when I have a ton of scripts written down which accomplish a lot of repetitive tasks without clicking.
  - ebiester 10y ago
    People get creative: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540
- mchristen 10y ago
  What about the first time you are using the program? You certainly do need to read all the menu options and search around until you find the correct settings to tweak. No matter what interface you use there is always going to be an initial learning curve, some people prefer the CLI and others prefer the GUI, there's nothing wrong with that.
- joatmon-snoo 10y ago
  For me, at least, I feel much more in control of what's actually going on when I'm working on the command line; once you hit the GUI level, there's another layer of abstraction that you have to understand and deal with that in a lot of cases isn't very helpful. Case in point, right now I'm an undergrad TA'ing a C++ class. One thing that has been very useful when helping students out is compiling their code under Clang and GCC, which for me, is as simple as just changing `CXX` when I cmake their stuff. But hell if I have any idea how to change that easily in their IDE. It's also easier for me to redirect compiler output somewhere so I can look at it, and for maybe everything except step-by-step debugging, I have pretty much no need for the IDE. Granted, GUIs can offer a lot of advantages - if I'm moving data between two different computers, I will almost definitely use WinSCP, unless it's someone I need to script, simply because the interface is clean, straightforward, and I've never yet had to worry about side effects. And obviously, I use a browser like Chrome and an email client like Gmail. But there are some things where the GUI just adds way too much complexity that I don't ever want to deal with.
lupu 10y ago
True, could not get used with putty myself also. But since I upgraded to Ubuntu I started using only PacManager as my primary ssh connection manager and never looked back
txdv 10y ago
ssh -D 8080 <target_host> I don't know about you guys, but the equivalent of this command top is painful to clickity click through the interface of putty.

tokenizerrr 10y ago

> Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool? You're clearly a Linux person. Or at least a command line person. I am too. Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever. They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand. So, my point is, there are a lot of people who have used GUIs their entire life and are used to be able to figure things out by just staring at the GUI and spending 30 minutes aimlessly clicking about. Then when they use a CLI program they have no idea what to do, and get frustrated. Because they're not used to RTFM.

bytelayer 10y ago
What's wrong with GitHub Desktop? Just enter your commit message and click "Sync". Much easier than using the command line.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  We don't use GitHub and looking at https://desktop.github.com/ https://desktop.github.com/ it's not a Git client, but a GitHub client.
  - Rafert 10y ago
    It's a git client: https://help.github.com/desktop/faq/articles/do-you-support-hosts-other-than-github/ https://help.github.com/desktop/faq/articles/do-you-support-...
    - tokenizerrr 10y ago
      Ah ok, I'll let my Eclipse Git coworkers know about this. Shame there isn't a Linux version or I could give it a go myself to see how it compares. I assume it does branching well.
- coredog64 10y ago
  I recommend GitHub Desktop to most of my coworkers that come to me with git problems. It's nice in that it also installs a command line version of git that I use with Powershell. In that sense it is useful because they can grow into power users should the need arise.
k__ 10y ago
I found it even strange for a Windows app. Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  > Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started. Of all things, I don't think that is a bad design choice. I would get really annoyed if all the changes I've made in the different tabs were to disappear because I happened to click on one of the already existing sessions in the list. Perhaps because I'd want to update it.
egeozcan 10y ago
We wanted to switch to Git from Mercurial because we wanted something like Gitlab. The only reason we didn't was that there wasn't any app for Git which was as user-friendly as TortoiseHg.
- sk5t 10y ago
  Tower is quite nice, in late beta for Windows.
  - egeozcan 10y ago
    This looks even cleaner than TortoiseHg and that's an achievement! Thank you. I guess it wasn't available when we first looked.
- efraim 10y ago
  Have a look at Gitkraken - https://www.gitkraken.com/features https://www.gitkraken.com/features
- WayneBro 10y ago
  There is TortoiseGit!
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    Which pales in comparison to the multi-platform goodness of TortoiseHg since it is an independent creation designed from the ground up for the distributed workflow rather than a reworked TortoiseSVN. I wish someone would do a Git conversion of THG.
    - WayneBro 10y ago
      Besides not being cross platform, how does it pale in comparison? I've been using it for over five years and I can't imagine what it could possibly be missing...
  - Too 10y ago
manyxcxi 10y ago
I use the command line for the majority of my day and I still use a Git GUI (Tower for Mac) because in one single window I have all my repositories traversable, I can instantly see what is changing, and get a diff of a file in one click without leaving the window. For any commit/merge/push/pull standard maneuvers (probably 99.8%) I do, Tower is faster. Anything 'complicated' and I'm using git in the command line. But I do agree about the Eclipse git client. It's the worst client I think I have ever seen. Every dev I know that relies on it regularly finds away to bork their local version or to screw up the central repository on a regular enough basis that it's not even a surprise anymore.
SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
How can you survive as a developer without at least passing familiarity with the command line? This is worrisome indeed.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
>Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever. >They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand. I still find it hard to believe that there are people like this out there. You're a programmer! You write in programming languages all day, but you think at a new language, a relatively simple one used by thousands of people who aren't professional programmers, will be hard to learn. I guess Steve Yegge was right. Programmers really do hate learning new languages.
- wott 10y ago
  There are many people who are completely lost without an IDE, or even without their IDE. Some of them have no idea of what is going on underneath. It is not rare to read such people around here.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    That's... terrifying. I mean, I am often in awe of my own staggering ignorance, but at least I'm doing something about it. I hazily know how CPUs work (more or less), I understand why cache misses matter (now: thanks HN). I understand the basics of Big O, what kinds of functions are computable, and why O(n^2) or O(n!) is really bad. I know some common algorithms for simple problems, and I know how to recognize the Travelling Salesman when I see it. That's not all that I know, not by a long shot, but I know that what I know is a tiny drop in the ocean of what I don't. It's just baffling that there are people out there, likely older than me, who aren't actively trying to learn more. I mean, if you don't like computing enough to be motivated to learn more about it, why are you in the industry?
- oblio 10y ago
  Those people are the majority (or at least a large plurality). Quit your job as a game dev/web dev at a large software vendor/startup and join the enterprise Java/.NET devs working on middleware and be amazed at how scared they are of anything outside of the IDE.
mastazi 10y ago
At work there are a few devs like that. I should specify that they are really good developers, and they are certainly able to work "the Linux way" if they have to, it's just that they are more comfortable using GUIs and "fat" IDEs rather than a CLI + a "lean" text editor. Still, I am convinced that, for advanced users, CLI wins over GUI. Even outside of the sw dev world, I see many professionals (e.g. graphic designers) who, in order to increase productivity, learn so many keyboard shortcuts that they end up using their keyboard more than their mouse: in my mind, I see that as a "CLI-zation" of the GUI. Another point is ease of sharing: with CLI-based work-flows, you can just write down everything in the company wiki, all is just text. The thought of having to take screenshots in order to describe a work-flow to a colleague (vs. just writing down commands) drives me mad.

weazl 10y ago

> Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool? For me it's the easily clickable URLs. Copying and pasting URLs in other CLI-environments on Windows is cumbersome at best.

WayneBro 10y ago

It's never been clear to me why anyone would want to use a completely opaque and undiscoverable interface such as a commandline over a nice GUI for anything. You didn't have to read anything or search around in order to change all of those settings in the GUI. If I were just transferring files or editing files remotely I would use WinSCP which has a much better interface than PuTTY. I can't stand browsing files through the commandline on any OS... It's so tedious. Also, you can operate the entirety of Windows with just the keyboard. You don't even have to pick up the mouse at all. The Tab and Enter keys get you pretty far without even having to know anything special.

jjawssd 10y ago
Scriptability is just as important as discoverability. I don't feel like constantly clicking to accomplish the same task when I have a ton of scripts written down which accomplish a lot of repetitive tasks without clicking.
- ebiester 10y ago
  People get creative: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540
mchristen 10y ago
What about the first time you are using the program? You certainly do need to read all the menu options and search around until you find the correct settings to tweak. No matter what interface you use there is always going to be an initial learning curve, some people prefer the CLI and others prefer the GUI, there's nothing wrong with that.
joatmon-snoo 10y ago
For me, at least, I feel much more in control of what's actually going on when I'm working on the command line; once you hit the GUI level, there's another layer of abstraction that you have to understand and deal with that in a lot of cases isn't very helpful. Case in point, right now I'm an undergrad TA'ing a C++ class. One thing that has been very useful when helping students out is compiling their code under Clang and GCC, which for me, is as simple as just changing `CXX` when I cmake their stuff. But hell if I have any idea how to change that easily in their IDE. It's also easier for me to redirect compiler output somewhere so I can look at it, and for maybe everything except step-by-step debugging, I have pretty much no need for the IDE. Granted, GUIs can offer a lot of advantages - if I'm moving data between two different computers, I will almost definitely use WinSCP, unless it's someone I need to script, simply because the interface is clean, straightforward, and I've never yet had to worry about side effects. And obviously, I use a browser like Chrome and an email client like Gmail. But there are some things where the GUI just adds way too much complexity that I don't ever want to deal with.

lupu 10y ago

True, could not get used with putty myself also. But since I upgraded to Ubuntu I started using only PacManager as my primary ssh connection manager and never looked back

txdv 10y ago

ssh -D 8080 <target_host> I don't know about you guys, but the equivalent of this command top is painful to clickity click through the interface of putty.