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About half of those guy apps you're presenting are irreplaceable. The other half are not. GIMP, Paint, Photoshop, Lighttable, VLC, LuminanceHDR, Blender, fire

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?

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?