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There's more than just effort to consider. Discoverability, confidence, error recovery, and consistency come to mind. You might be in a terminal, in the direct

There's more than just effort to consider. Discoverability, confidence, error recovery, and consistency come to mind. You might be in a terminal, in the directory you're you want to copy a file within... $open ., type file name, command-C, command-C, command-W would do a great job, require minimal additional effort, but provide better visibility into the status of the copy, allow you to better handle file name collisions, allow you to retry, and be undoable. If you didn't know the correct program or arguments for zip, you could simply look around the menus and find 'compress'. Even scripting, you can use the best tool for the job. AppleScript or similar can be used to script GUIs and also for testing.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
For 90% of this stuff “discoverability” isn’t a problem anymore, I’ve already crossed the learning curve of the command line and I just think in terms of the available command line programs. For the next 5%, I tend to pipe a command like find or ls to a file and then use vim to quickly make a shell script that does what I need. I don’t know if it’s more efficient, objectively, but this just is the workflow that matches how I think.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  I've been using the terminal (admittedly not as my main interface) for 20 years and I still have to consult man pages, documentation, and google about 10 times a day. I'd say discoverability is certainly still a large problem with CLI.
  - II2II 6y ago
    Apple had an interesting take on discoverability with AU/X and MPW: you could pull up a dialog box with the available options and descriptions. Unlike man pages, you could select the desired options from the dialog box and execute the resulting command. It's not the sort of thing you would want to use often, but it was great for learning how to do things or to refresh one's memory.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      In zsh, I think Ctrl-/ pops up the manpage and then restores the command line when you quit (this may be just my config). It’s not as nice, but zsh’s line editor does implement everything you need to extend it with this sort of workflow

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

For 90% of this stuff “discoverability” isn’t a problem anymore, I’ve already crossed the learning curve of the command line and I just think in terms of the available command line programs. For the next 5%, I tend to pipe a command like find or ls to a file and then use vim to quickly make a shell script that does what I need. I don’t know if it’s more efficient, objectively, but this just is the workflow that matches how I think.

cosmotic 6y ago
I've been using the terminal (admittedly not as my main interface) for 20 years and I still have to consult man pages, documentation, and google about 10 times a day. I'd say discoverability is certainly still a large problem with CLI.
- II2II 6y ago
  Apple had an interesting take on discoverability with AU/X and MPW: you could pull up a dialog box with the available options and descriptions. Unlike man pages, you could select the desired options from the dialog box and execute the resulting command. It's not the sort of thing you would want to use often, but it was great for learning how to do things or to refresh one's memory.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    In zsh, I think Ctrl-/ pops up the manpage and then restores the command line when you quit (this may be just my config). It’s not as nice, but zsh’s line editor does implement everything you need to extend it with this sort of workflow