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> These realizations are humorous to software folks of my generation who started on Punch Cards, then IBM 3270s, then VT100s and/or teletypes and Decwriters. A

> These realizations are humorous to software folks of my generation who started on Punch Cards, then IBM 3270s, then VT100s and/or teletypes and Decwriters. As someone who is also old enough to have used all these ancient technologies, I'm mystified as to why people today would want to go back to doing everything from a command line interface. Some things are really better done in GUIs. For example, why should I use diff if I can use kdiff3 instead?

pfranz 7y ago
I think a lot my nimbleness comes from avoiding the mouse...which can also be done fairly well in most GUIs. In the case you mention, I'd reach for vimdiff. Maybe it's a career thing, but I've been shifted to enough different environments that I couldn't consistently learn and use the same GUI diff tool (commandline servers, Windows, macOS, Linuxes where I can only install new things to my homedir). It's also very nice to have your editor right there. I work in VFX. Obviously all of the tools effectively require a GUI, but when dealing with large projects requiring a lot of files and servers I can't imagine only having a GUI. Here are a bunch of use-cases that come to mind: - We deal with a lot of image sequences; numbered files for each frame of video. Each piece of software has their own interface for "squishing" them down so you're looking at a list of file sequences instead of 1000s of individual files. Renumbering, renaming, or even sorting through them sucks in Windows Explorer, Finder, etc. A few simple commandline tools, many of which ship with any Linux terminal, make that easier. Although, I have found it much easier to use the GUI to pick out outliers (random frames that are 0-size, a grouping with a similar timestamp, random frames that are solid black). It's faster than building up a `ls -l | sort | grep | head` - Remoting into servers. Just logging into 10 servers to see if a local file was installed or what Nvidia driver they're running. Remote desktop would be miserable or you'd need special tools. ssh in a for loop does this trivially--if you have more than a handful use GNU parallel or a flavor of ssh that does it concurrently. - Most project files are ascii and there are a lot of situations where tweaking one or more of them saves a lot of time. For 1 file you can use a gui, if it's like 3 files you can use a macro in your IDE, 10-100 files you /can/ probably use an IDE but setting up a project and confirming it worked has more overhead than commandline tools. - I still don't like any GUI file search tools in practice. I think it's because of the guardrails and optimizations? `find`, `grep`, and `locate` work way more predictably on system files, network paths, and USB drives, where GUI tools seem to have way more limitations. But I'm the fist to admit I don't think it's the best way to work for everybody.

pfranz 7y ago

I think a lot my nimbleness comes from avoiding the mouse...which can also be done fairly well in most GUIs. In the case you mention, I'd reach for vimdiff. Maybe it's a career thing, but I've been shifted to enough different environments that I couldn't consistently learn and use the same GUI diff tool (commandline servers, Windows, macOS, Linuxes where I can only install new things to my homedir). It's also very nice to have your editor right there. I work in VFX. Obviously all of the tools effectively require a GUI, but when dealing with large projects requiring a lot of files and servers I can't imagine only having a GUI. Here are a bunch of use-cases that come to mind: - We deal with a lot of image sequences; numbered files for each frame of video. Each piece of software has their own interface for "squishing" them down so you're looking at a list of file sequences instead of 1000s of individual files. Renumbering, renaming, or even sorting through them sucks in Windows Explorer, Finder, etc. A few simple commandline tools, many of which ship with any Linux terminal, make that easier. Although, I have found it much easier to use the GUI to pick out outliers (random frames that are 0-size, a grouping with a similar timestamp, random frames that are solid black). It's faster than building up a `ls -l | sort | grep | head` - Remoting into servers. Just logging into 10 servers to see if a local file was installed or what Nvidia driver they're running. Remote desktop would be miserable or you'd need special tools. ssh in a for loop does this trivially--if you have more than a handful use GNU parallel or a flavor of ssh that does it concurrently. - Most project files are ascii and there are a lot of situations where tweaking one or more of them saves a lot of time. For 1 file you can use a gui, if it's like 3 files you can use a macro in your IDE, 10-100 files you /can/ probably use an IDE but setting up a project and confirming it worked has more overhead than commandline tools. - I still don't like any GUI file search tools in practice. I think it's because of the guardrails and optimizations? `find`, `grep`, and `locate` work way more predictably on system files, network paths, and USB drives, where GUI tools seem to have way more limitations. But I'm the fist to admit I don't think it's the best way to work for everybody.