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> FWIW, I am an end user not a developer Well now I'm really curious about your actual software use-cases here. Because regardless of whatever "end user not de

> FWIW, I am an end user not a developer Well now I'm really curious about your actual software use-cases here. Because regardless of whatever "end user not dev" use-case I can think of, out of the many multiple dozens that instantly spring to mind, I cannot name a single one that has not had for 1-2 decades multiple well-known, widely-used-daily, best-in-class apps or suites on the market that are fully GUI-no-CLI and are at the very least evidently "reliable enough". Whatever GUI app I have used in the past 10 years, we can talk GIMP/Paint/VS/Sublime/VLC/Photoshop/Lighttable/LuminanceHDR/Blender/Unity/Unreal/VScode/Thunderbird/Firefox/Chromium/archival-tools/file-explorers/countless-others --- not only have they been utterly reliable and predictably delivered as was demandedd, their CLI alternatives hovered between non-existent and underfeatured. So "end user not a dev" to me sounds like you must be a sys-admin or maybe, "author of man pages" ;)

GuiA 9y ago
??? All of the software you mention has had, over the versions, introductions of major bugs, regressions, UI elements changing for the sake of it, features available in a previous version being removed in a subsequent version (sometimes to be reintroduced later)... Is that your definition of utterly reliable and predictable?
- pharrington 9y ago
  Beyond not addressing the comment you're replying to, are you saying your reply doesn't also apply to CLI software?
earenndil 9y ago
About half of those guy apps you're presenting are irreplaceable. The other half are not. GIMP, Paint, Photoshop, Lighttable, VLC, LuminanceHDR, Blender, firefox, chromium (image/video viewers/editors, web browsers) are all about looking at, creating, and modifying things that are graphical in nature. Thunderbird, a mail reader, is about looking at things that are textual in nature. Same with file explorers, archival tools, and text editors. These things work fine with a cli interface. Unreal/unity are a bit of a special case -- there's nothing that does exactly what they do from cli, because that's impossible, but it's more than possible to create large playable graphical video games directly with a text editor and a cli -- even if it's not possible to play them that way.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I don't have a lot of experience, but I suspect that many visual applications could be greatly improved by a well defined command language. The various dialog boxes and widgets in apps like Gimp and Inkscape always seem fussy and annoying to me, especially when I know exactly what I want. If I could talk to the app, I would say "put margins 2cm from the page edge" or "position object X halfway between objects Y and Z", etc. Blender has a Python console, and it's even somewhat discoverable because you can find out how to script an action you do in the UI, but the Python API is too verbose and ugly to be an actual daily mode of operation, I think.
  - earenndil 9y ago
    Sure, there can be a textual component. This works out well and is even necessary in, e.g., game engines. But ultimately you're modifying an image and you need to be able to see the modifications as you make them even if the way you're making them is with the keyboard.
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      I think you missed his point: he meant manipulating an (vector) image with cli. So you type what to change and then you see the change.
      - earenndil 9y ago
        No, I get that. But it's still fundamentally a gui application
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  A book is text. What command do you type to turn pages in a book? Oh, you don't?

GuiA 9y ago

??? All of the software you mention has had, over the versions, introductions of major bugs, regressions, UI elements changing for the sake of it, features available in a previous version being removed in a subsequent version (sometimes to be reintroduced later)... Is that your definition of utterly reliable and predictable?

pharrington 9y ago
Beyond not addressing the comment you're replying to, are you saying your reply doesn't also apply to CLI software?

earenndil 9y ago

About half of those guy apps you're presenting are irreplaceable. The other half are not. GIMP, Paint, Photoshop, Lighttable, VLC, LuminanceHDR, Blender, firefox, chromium (image/video viewers/editors, web browsers) are all about looking at, creating, and modifying things that are graphical in nature. Thunderbird, a mail reader, is about looking at things that are textual in nature. Same with file explorers, archival tools, and text editors. These things work fine with a cli interface. Unreal/unity are a bit of a special case -- there's nothing that does exactly what they do from cli, because that's impossible, but it's more than possible to create large playable graphical video games directly with a text editor and a cli -- even if it's not possible to play them that way.

mbrock 9y ago
I don't have a lot of experience, but I suspect that many visual applications could be greatly improved by a well defined command language. The various dialog boxes and widgets in apps like Gimp and Inkscape always seem fussy and annoying to me, especially when I know exactly what I want. If I could talk to the app, I would say "put margins 2cm from the page edge" or "position object X halfway between objects Y and Z", etc. Blender has a Python console, and it's even somewhat discoverable because you can find out how to script an action you do in the UI, but the Python API is too verbose and ugly to be an actual daily mode of operation, I think.
- earenndil 9y ago
  Sure, there can be a textual component. This works out well and is even necessary in, e.g., game engines. But ultimately you're modifying an image and you need to be able to see the modifications as you make them even if the way you're making them is with the keyboard.
  - hutzlibu 9y ago
    I think you missed his point: he meant manipulating an (vector) image with cli. So you type what to change and then you see the change.
    - earenndil 9y ago
      No, I get that. But it's still fundamentally a gui application
fjsolwmv 9y ago
A book is text. What command do you type to turn pages in a book? Oh, you don't?