4 ms·
Contrary to everyone else here: hell yes, every single time. GUIs are discoverable, and have lower friction for first time users. Example : a video codec GUI w
by nothrabannosir 8y ago
Contrary to everyone else here: hell yes, every single time.
GUIs are discoverable, and have lower friction for first time users. Example : a video codec GUI will always be easier to use than ffmpeg. I still Google how to use ffmpeg after 10years , and I have to read the entire man page because I don’t know what I don’t know! Is there a newer, better option to this flag available? Like lame for mp3s (another great example), a man page which (used to?) start off with bitrate options, but at the end says; forget all that, just use --preset. Or imagemagick, which decides to go for undiscoverability gold and split their entire program up over multiple binaries so you now get to read multiple man pages! After you guess what the names of those programs are, of course.
Hell. Give me a gui for any unfamiliar task, any time.
Of course, were I encodig movies every day, I’d be singing a very different tune.
Edit: another example: I resize images about once a week and I still have to google imagemagick’s convert. I keep forgetting how to resize to known width, keeping height ratio. It’s so frustrating that I’ve just given up and sort of guess with % instead, until it’s close enough. Not to mention resizing to a desired file size (is that even possible? With a gui, at least I’d know if it were at all. Now I’m just tired of reading the man page. I give up. Imagemagick wins.)
- agumonkey 8y agoit's not cli, it's the way it's designed. had a pervasive semi structured fuzzy matching at the OS level so anybody writing a program can have a good completion without resorting to shell generators and enjoy easy discoverability. GUIs are easier to explore right now but they also have lots of hidden state and obscure organization (good luck knowing which options interferes with who and where they are some times)
- rdc12 8y agoThat is more a product of complexity thou. The other day I was doing some basic data collection and graphing, with the initial version being done in Excel, for something as basic as adding a trendline I had to resort to googling the answer, and following a sequence of several click this, then click this style to get what I needed. Turns out it was actually easier to understand how to do what I needed using python matplotlib (not a CLI program granted). Design, documentation and managing complexity are far more important to discoverability than GUI vs CLI.