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Graphical interfaces are useful to me personally because unlike a CLI, there is substantially less in the way of functionality that I have to remember, especial

by nnfy 9y ago

Graphical interfaces are useful to me personally because unlike a CLI, there is substantially less in the way of functionality that I have to remember, especially for programs which I rarely use. It is painful to input -h args and read through pages and pages of options to find a handful of the options that I need, especially when I am using something new. I've given light thought to the possibility of writing some kind of hybrid which acts as a general purpose terminal, but can somehow provide more information in a graphical manner-even something like directory traversal would be drastically simpler, IMO. Of course, this is not a trivial problem. Are there any existing shells which hybridize GUI and CLI?

eikenberry 9y ago
I find with CLI there is much less to remember over time due to command history. If I ever ran the command in the past, I can see exactly what I ran. I don't have to remember as the computer does it for me. The only possible tweak this involves is upping your history, as many shells default to a short history.
Theodores 9y ago
Some of this depends on what you are used to. I prefer the command line myself but all my colleagues have these graphical interface things going on. So when I am working collaboratively on someone else's machine I have to endure things like graphical file browsers. This works great if you are working with images and need to see the thumbnails to visually identify something. But for me, seeing a GUI view of files, I can't make sense of it. It takes me time to scan and find what I was looking for. I would prefer to see results from the 'find' or 'ls' command. I can see what I am looking for that way but my colleagues don't understand what they are looking at. This gets worse with applications. For instance there is a web server control panel called 'Cpanel' that people buy into because they don't want to do the command line. This one really is a 'sea of icons' and I have no idea how you are supposed to work like that. But to people who don't appreciate that on a server you probably want to just run a few things (all available in the history file), the 'sea of icons' provides a lot of help. Those of us that use the command line are 'having a conversation' with our computers and 'teaching' these machines to do stuff. Meanwhile, the GUI folks are true 'users', there is no 'conversation', it is a fundamentally different relationship.
discreteevent 9y ago
Some CLI utilities have code completion but it's not great. I don't see any reason why you couldn't have good code completion with pick lists and inline documentation like IDEs. Its kind of frustrating that we are stuck with bash when this problem (API discoverablity) has been solved a long time ago.

by nnfy 9y ago

eikenberry 9y ago

I find with CLI there is much less to remember over time due to command history. If I ever ran the command in the past, I can see exactly what I ran. I don't have to remember as the computer does it for me. The only possible tweak this involves is upping your history, as many shells default to a short history.

Theodores 9y ago

Some of this depends on what you are used to. I prefer the command line myself but all my colleagues have these graphical interface things going on. So when I am working collaboratively on someone else's machine I have to endure things like graphical file browsers. This works great if you are working with images and need to see the thumbnails to visually identify something. But for me, seeing a GUI view of files, I can't make sense of it. It takes me time to scan and find what I was looking for. I would prefer to see results from the 'find' or 'ls' command. I can see what I am looking for that way but my colleagues don't understand what they are looking at. This gets worse with applications. For instance there is a web server control panel called 'Cpanel' that people buy into because they don't want to do the command line. This one really is a 'sea of icons' and I have no idea how you are supposed to work like that. But to people who don't appreciate that on a server you probably want to just run a few things (all available in the history file), the 'sea of icons' provides a lot of help. Those of us that use the command line are 'having a conversation' with our computers and 'teaching' these machines to do stuff. Meanwhile, the GUI folks are true 'users', there is no 'conversation', it is a fundamentally different relationship.

discreteevent 9y ago

Some CLI utilities have code completion but it's not great. I don't see any reason why you couldn't have good code completion with pick lists and inline documentation like IDEs. Its kind of frustrating that we are stuck with bash when this problem (API discoverablity) has been solved a long time ago.