5 ms·

This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner, which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices.

by ktpsns 6y ago

This is what quality software looks like: It has power features around the corner, which can be turned on by experts. But is nevertheless accessible by novices. CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface.

Kototama 6y ago
> CLI is trending amongst dev's again Did it ever stopped being useful?
- dspillett 6y ago
  No, but it became a bit of a victim of being unfashionable. I think partly because of an influx of new devs who weren't in the position of having little choice but to learn at least some of the non-GUI way, particularly in the web sphere. As things have matured (arguably) and become more complex, and those devs have gained experience, they've started seeing the benefits of other methodologies. I just hope it doesn't swing back too far the other way as it has before (I've been around long enough to have seen the cycle previously!). I'm a big fan for command line, scriptable, tools and plain text pipe-able output, and have been since being introduced to pipes & redirection all those decades ago, but we need to avoid the holier-than-thou thing that seems to develop when our old timer ways get the lime-light for a while. It only serves to put people off learning that they are great tools for many jobs and definitively the right ones for a some.
  - vinay_ys 6y ago
    CLI has always been in vogue. It is TUI (text user interface – ncurses kind) has fallen out of fashion. Long time back, I used to use mutt, lynx, midnight commander etc on a daily basis. In mid/late 2000s, it fell off for me. Other than top, htop, dstat and a few others, there aren't that many that come to mind these days.
    - arexxbifs 6y ago
      I'd say TUI:s are coming back with a vengeance. Check out newsboat, nmtui, ranger, w3m, mikmod, slack-term/weechat/irssi/finch, sc, mps-youtube, micro (text editor) just to name a few... Seems to be very popular among people who use tiling window managers. In fact, with a good terminal multiplexer, mpv and fbv, all you need X for is stuff like web apps and Gimp.
- ratww 6y ago
  They never stopped being useful, but at some point CLI was hidden by a lot of popular tools, like Visual Studio, Delphi, Xamarin, Xcode, Java IDEs, etc. So it was possible to program and rarely see a console. Today, even some of those tools are embracing CLIs.
- Too 6y ago
  There seems to be a trend last few years where many of even the most traditional CLIs are getting questioned by modern replacements that provide a richer experience without compromising on the old values of simplicity. For example ripgrep, bat or exa instead of grep, cat and ls.
zokier 6y ago
Htop is not cli, and ncurses is in general just poor emulation of gui.
- 1996 6y ago
  It's ok if you don't like TUIs, but don't call them "poor emulations" of GUIs. They do different things differently, but they achieve great results in their own ways. The mc file manager or ranger more than stands the comparison against graphical file managers.
  - silon42 6y ago
    The problem is ncurses / terminals ... poor keyboard support, etc...
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Lets call them what they are: a workaround to display graphical content in a terminal windows. We need them because SSH, because we linux UI is a mess, because UI is hard, in embedded, etc. In an ideal world the concept of TUI would not exist.
    - simias 6y ago
      Sometimes less is more. Having access to more features sometimes leads devs to bloat their applications and make them subjectively less usable. A pathological example for me would be gvim. I tried using it for a while but I kept running into weird performance issues and general lagginess. Meanwhile from a terminal it Just Works. So I don't bother with it anymore, I always run Vim from a terminal and I never looked back. In general I find that the terminal imposes two generally good constraints to application makers: everything must exist within a single window and mouse interaction is very limited (and not supported everywhere) so it's important that everything must be achievable with keyboard inputs. These constraints disincentivize pathological mouse-driven "click click" pop up dialog fests which are the bane of my existence.
      - 6y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> CLI is trending amongst dev's again I don't know if that's as true as "GUIs are now unfashionable to devs". It is hard to blame them since GUIs have regressed so significantly ever since the iPhone.
globular-toast 6y ago
> CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface. htop has a GUI, not a CLI. Some people call it a "TUI" but in terms of UX and program architecture it's a lot closer to a GUI than a CLI.
parentheses 6y ago
.. and performant! Folks need to stop shipping CLI tools written in node with a million dependencies. Part of why the shell is gaining is that UIs are invariably becoming less efficient with rampant use of React and node for native apps. I did not say node is slow.

by ktpsns 6y ago

Kototama 6y ago

> CLI is trending amongst dev's again Did it ever stopped being useful?

dspillett 6y ago
No, but it became a bit of a victim of being unfashionable. I think partly because of an influx of new devs who weren't in the position of having little choice but to learn at least some of the non-GUI way, particularly in the web sphere. As things have matured (arguably) and become more complex, and those devs have gained experience, they've started seeing the benefits of other methodologies. I just hope it doesn't swing back too far the other way as it has before (I've been around long enough to have seen the cycle previously!). I'm a big fan for command line, scriptable, tools and plain text pipe-able output, and have been since being introduced to pipes & redirection all those decades ago, but we need to avoid the holier-than-thou thing that seems to develop when our old timer ways get the lime-light for a while. It only serves to put people off learning that they are great tools for many jobs and definitively the right ones for a some.
- vinay_ys 6y ago
  CLI has always been in vogue. It is TUI (text user interface – ncurses kind) has fallen out of fashion. Long time back, I used to use mutt, lynx, midnight commander etc on a daily basis. In mid/late 2000s, it fell off for me. Other than top, htop, dstat and a few others, there aren't that many that come to mind these days.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    I'd say TUI:s are coming back with a vengeance. Check out newsboat, nmtui, ranger, w3m, mikmod, slack-term/weechat/irssi/finch, sc, mps-youtube, micro (text editor) just to name a few... Seems to be very popular among people who use tiling window managers. In fact, with a good terminal multiplexer, mpv and fbv, all you need X for is stuff like web apps and Gimp.
ratww 6y ago
They never stopped being useful, but at some point CLI was hidden by a lot of popular tools, like Visual Studio, Delphi, Xamarin, Xcode, Java IDEs, etc. So it was possible to program and rarely see a console. Today, even some of those tools are embracing CLIs.
Too 6y ago
There seems to be a trend last few years where many of even the most traditional CLIs are getting questioned by modern replacements that provide a richer experience without compromising on the old values of simplicity. For example ripgrep, bat or exa instead of grep, cat and ls.

zokier 6y ago

Htop is not cli, and ncurses is in general just poor emulation of gui.

1996 6y ago
It's ok if you don't like TUIs, but don't call them "poor emulations" of GUIs. They do different things differently, but they achieve great results in their own ways. The mc file manager or ranger more than stands the comparison against graphical file managers.
- silon42 6y ago
  The problem is ncurses / terminals ... poor keyboard support, etc...
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Lets call them what they are: a workaround to display graphical content in a terminal windows. We need them because SSH, because we linux UI is a mess, because UI is hard, in embedded, etc. In an ideal world the concept of TUI would not exist.
  - simias 6y ago
    Sometimes less is more. Having access to more features sometimes leads devs to bloat their applications and make them subjectively less usable. A pathological example for me would be gvim. I tried using it for a while but I kept running into weird performance issues and general lagginess. Meanwhile from a terminal it Just Works. So I don't bother with it anymore, I always run Vim from a terminal and I never looked back. In general I find that the terminal imposes two generally good constraints to application makers: everything must exist within a single window and mouse interaction is very limited (and not supported everywhere) so it's important that everything must be achievable with keyboard inputs. These constraints disincentivize pathological mouse-driven "click click" pop up dialog fests which are the bane of my existence.
    - 6y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> CLI is trending amongst dev's again I don't know if that's as true as "GUIs are now unfashionable to devs". It is hard to blame them since GUIs have regressed so significantly ever since the iPhone.

globular-toast 6y ago

> CLI is trending amongst dev's again, and we should take a lesson by htop how to design a good user interface. htop has a GUI, not a CLI. Some people call it a "TUI" but in terms of UX and program architecture it's a lot closer to a GUI than a CLI.

parentheses 6y ago

.. and performant! Folks need to stop shipping CLI tools written in node with a million dependencies. Part of why the shell is gaining is that UIs are invariably becoming less efficient with rampant use of React and node for native apps. I did not say node is slow.