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100% agree with everything you said. So many people use gatekeeping around using CLI, it's crazy frustrating. Use what you're efficient at for the job at hand.
by gregmac 6y ago
100% agree with everything you said. So many people use gatekeeping around using CLI, it's crazy frustrating. Use what you're efficient at for the job at hand.
To expand on your example: for a lot of readers of HN, moving all JPGs in a bunch of folders is going to be easier and faster with a CLI. But for <non-technical person in your life> who needs to do it very rarely, it's probably still going to be faster for them to navigate folder-by-folder in a file explorer, sort by file type, shift+select, repeat, than it is to learn how to use CLI to do it.
For technical people, GUIs also reduce burden, and let us be lazy. I "know" (or at least once did) how to configure Samba by hand, but for the last many years I've run OpenMediaVault at home and use the UI to do it for me. I don't use Samba for anything else in my life or work, so why do I want to remember or even spend the time reading the manual when I need to make a change to it once a year or so? I'd rather just log into the UI, click a few things, and be done. Nothing to actually remember, as the GUI gives me enough information to figure it out as I go.
I spend a lot of effort to be lazy. If I was regularly moving JPGs out of a folder, I'd probably go further and write a shell script or alias, or even just make a cron job to do it for me; likewise I'm happy to install/use a GUI app for certain things if it means I save time vs reading man pages or having to remember arcane commands I rarely use.