3 ms·

> 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.

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.