4 ms·

I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of

I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of head-scratching changes over the years, and I figure that the product managers just don't know who the features were for or what they're used for.

derefr 9y ago
Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature? Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true? Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. CLIs are opaque by definition. With a GUI you can click around menus until you find what you're looking for; with a CLI you can't even begin unless you already know what you're doing. Man pages are no help to newbies; they're either uselessly terse, impenetrably jargon-packed, or both. It's probably possible to make a CLI that's relatively easy-to-use and newbie-friendly, but I've never seen anyone attempt it. People used MS-DOS for years because it was the only way to access the large majority of software, and abandoned it as soon as there was a viable alternative (Win9x).
  - davrosthedalek 9y ago
    I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.
    - crispinb 9y ago
      This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages. In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.
      - kemitche 9y ago
        I shudder to think how hard it would be - likely impossible - to use a bad git GUI if I didn't already know many of the git CLI commands. Even just, say, MS Word. If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. For both CLI and GUI, Google or official docs are the only reasonable way to discover.
        PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        > If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. I find that clicking around through menus often teaches me about great features I didn't even know I wanted. Regardless of the cause, in practice, I find that it's much easier to get basic functionality out of a new-to-me GUI app than a CLI app. That may not be a fundamental properly of CLI, but it certainly is how all significant CLIs are written.
        monkmartinez 9y ago
        So absolutely with you on this. Exploring visually is best for me as well.
        abakker 9y ago
        Yep! I have nothing against CLIs, but imagine starting with the CLI in something like CAD. Sure, they have CLIs, but wow would that be hard. Without google, I'd have never learned any CLI stuff, and even as it is, I have no idea why the flags can't just be words instead of letters.
  - Lio 9y ago
    When MSDOS was in active use computers in general were used by a much smaller section of the population. That could well be because many people didn't get on with a CLI and Macs, at the time, were really expensive. To counter that with an example of what I consider really good man pages look git. I've learnt loads about rebasing, etc. from the examples in the git man pages. Personally I've always loved a good CLI.

derefr 9y ago

Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature? Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true? Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. CLIs are opaque by definition. With a GUI you can click around menus until you find what you're looking for; with a CLI you can't even begin unless you already know what you're doing. Man pages are no help to newbies; they're either uselessly terse, impenetrably jargon-packed, or both. It's probably possible to make a CLI that's relatively easy-to-use and newbie-friendly, but I've never seen anyone attempt it. People used MS-DOS for years because it was the only way to access the large majority of software, and abandoned it as soon as there was a viable alternative (Win9x).
- davrosthedalek 9y ago
  I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages. In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.
    - kemitche 9y ago
      I shudder to think how hard it would be - likely impossible - to use a bad git GUI if I didn't already know many of the git CLI commands. Even just, say, MS Word. If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. For both CLI and GUI, Google or official docs are the only reasonable way to discover.
      - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        > If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. I find that clicking around through menus often teaches me about great features I didn't even know I wanted. Regardless of the cause, in practice, I find that it's much easier to get basic functionality out of a new-to-me GUI app than a CLI app. That may not be a fundamental properly of CLI, but it certainly is how all significant CLIs are written.
        monkmartinez 9y ago
        So absolutely with you on this. Exploring visually is best for me as well.
        abakker 9y ago
        Yep! I have nothing against CLIs, but imagine starting with the CLI in something like CAD. Sure, they have CLIs, but wow would that be hard. Without google, I'd have never learned any CLI stuff, and even as it is, I have no idea why the flags can't just be words instead of letters.
- Lio 9y ago
  When MSDOS was in active use computers in general were used by a much smaller section of the population. That could well be because many people didn't get on with a CLI and Macs, at the time, were really expensive. To counter that with an example of what I consider really good man pages look git. I've learnt loads about rebasing, etc. from the examples in the git man pages. Personally I've always loved a good CLI.