3 ms·

I agree, there's always types of programs where one beats the other. I will never argue that a CLI browser, photo editor (if it exists?) or IDE for say Java has

I agree, there's always types of programs where one beats the other. I will never argue that a CLI browser, photo editor (if it exists?) or IDE for say Java has any advantage over a GUI. It's the stuff "in the middle" where it gets interesting. Even if you only consider power users or developers, many times the Windows user still resorts to GUI apps either out of habit or since there is no built-in CLI solution to the problem, and if you need to download anything anyways you might just go with a GUI app. But let's take find as an example: as a power user you might want something a little more involved than what the window search GUI offers, but as soon as you end up with something that involves AND and OR expressions a GUI is already subpar, and then you might want to process the files so you need either an "export to text file" function, or the ability to specify a command to execute. And even if the tool offers both, it's still hard to impossible to automate that task. You might find yourself ending up trying a dozen different file search utilities since you find one you manage to actually embed in an automated workflow. My experience is that Windows people just don't automate in many cases, although it's obviously absolutely possible to get all the GNU tools etc. on Windows too. They're just not being used that much.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> photo editor (if it exists?) ImageMagick. Mighty efficient, if you know what you want to do, and need to do this on couple hundred images.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Sure, I was more thinking of hand tuning a photo (retouch, cover up, remove a person in the background). But even if you just tweak contrast and brightness a GUI probably still wins if you don't know the exact values you want to apply beforehand. But batch processing on its own is another great example where CLI shines. With GUI apps you have to rely on the app shipping that feature, and then it's almost guaranteed it works slightly different in every app, has different semantics, hidden in a different spot etc. On the command line, the batch processing is external to the tool doing the processing, constructed using features of the shell, so once you understood how to batch process with one utility, you can do it with everything.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> photo editor (if it exists?) ImageMagick. Mighty efficient, if you know what you want to do, and need to do this on couple hundred images.

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Sure, I was more thinking of hand tuning a photo (retouch, cover up, remove a person in the background). But even if you just tweak contrast and brightness a GUI probably still wins if you don't know the exact values you want to apply beforehand. But batch processing on its own is another great example where CLI shines. With GUI apps you have to rely on the app shipping that feature, and then it's almost guaranteed it works slightly different in every app, has different semantics, hidden in a different spot etc. On the command line, the batch processing is external to the tool doing the processing, constructed using features of the shell, so once you understood how to batch process with one utility, you can do it with everything.