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I'm a little late to the party, but something I've come realize recently is that my affection towards CLI applications comes from the fact that I usually don't
by dwrodri 7y ago
I'm a little late to the party, but something I've come realize recently is that my affection towards CLI applications comes from the fact that I usually don't have to take my hands off the keyboard.
Human hands can move very fast, faster than we can assemble cogent thoughts thanks to muscle memory (and other things that I'm sure I'm not aware of). I don't know if this is a universal thing, but I like it when I don't have to think about how to get something done. I consciously picture the end goal in my mind, and my hands just do.
Of course, I'm a sloppy typist, and still relatively unrehearsed when it comes to working with Vim and friends. But I've been most of the standard GNU applications long enough to realize that my brain no longer directs my hands to interact with the keyboard for frequent simple tasks (generate a line plot for this two column CSV, use awk to get the penultimate column of this file, hash files in a directory to remove duplicates, open HN in a browser...).
I'm also a big sucker for working with programs that compose well with other programs. If I had all the time and money in the world, I'd love to have more GUI apps that explored GUI/CLI interop better. I think one example many developers can comment on is how nice it is when you can combine CLI git commands with git in your code editor. Sometimes, it's just easier to resolve ugly merge conflicts with a GUI. Or there's a really weird command that doesn't exist in your GUI so you need to type it out on the commandline.
There's definitely a lot more work to be done in this domain and I'm excited to see how software/OS/library developers explore this in years to come.
- curioussavage 7y agoI came to a similar realization which prompted me to start working on a suite of GUI programs that are keyboard focused. I think that is very different than an app with good keyboard shortcuts btw which is why, for example, despite many editors having great keyboard shortcuts I keep going back to vim. So I’m Making basic apps that are intended to be used entirely with a keyboard and just happen to support mouse input too. I realize this doesn’t work well for everything but my todo app and my note taking app should work great at least.