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You are taking the "expression" too far. We are talking about expression at the time of doing, not at the by-product of doing. GUI constrains you, it limits you
by super_mario 15y ago
You are taking the "expression" too far. We are talking about expression at the time of doing, not at the by-product of doing. GUI constrains you, it limits your expressive ability to tell the computer what to do. CLI is extremely expressive, it allows you to tell the computer what to do in very elaborate way, not only by having more options available for each command, but also by allowing you to combine things in ways GUIs simply can't allow for.
We are not talking about end products of this communication between computer and person, its output which could be images or software you created with the computer and which also allow you to express yourself in the more broader sense.
- CJefferson 15y agoAre you suggesting that there could be a CLI for creating and altering graphics, which was even 1% as effective as photoshop?
- keenerd 15y agoSure. Check out the Lisp repl that is built into AutoCAD.
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoI'm not the grandparent, but I use TikZ to "programmatically" create graphics in LaTeX. It is much faster and looks much better than what I produce in the GIMP. (See e.g. http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/. http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/.) Of course, I'm drawing graphs and geometric objects, not trying to do "photo work" - but CLIs can be an excellent interface to some kinds of graphics.
- super_mario 15y agoNo, I'm not. If you read carefully you will note that I'm talking about your expressive ability to tell the computer what you want it to do. Not about your ability to express yourself through a medium like video or images. By the way, there are some great CLI tools (like ImageMagic) to manipulate images from the CLI and these are indispensable for batch editing large collection of images and other applications (image analysis), but I was not referring to that.
- stonemetal 15y agoOk so I want to select the pretty green color from a photo for future use. In MS paint it would be two actions select the color selection tool and select the color. How do you do that from the CLI in more expressive way?
- recoiledsnake 15y ago>man paint Zillion lines of text scroll by swear >man paint | less go through 10 pages of text before finding the /pickcolour command >paint /pickcolor /x 123 /y 843 how the pixel position was found is left as an exercise for the reader option pickcolor not found curse and rerun the man and scroll through all the pages again realize it's /pickcolour and not /pickcolor >paint /pickcolor /x 123 /y 843 red gets selected after more furious rtfm'ing and Bing'ing(on Lynx of course), realize pickcolor uses coordinate calculation from the bottom right and not top left When you need to do this again in a month, forget the command and the spelling and repeat all of the above again.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- marshray 15y agoHow do you edit a text document using MS paint? Anyone can pick examples that make the discussion go nowhere. That's why this discussion never feels like it makes any progress.
- ugh 15y agoWhy should you be able to edit a text document with MS Paint? I don’t understand the point you are making.
- marshray 15y agoWhy should you be able to "select the pretty green color from a photo" via the CLI? That's my point - just because it's the wrong tool for some hyperspecific job doesn't imply anything useful in general. But if you really want to pursue the analogy, we could in fact come up with a command line that selects the green color value from a certain area of an image a lot easier than one could edit a non-image file using MS Paint (though I've seen that done too).
- ugh 15y agoI don’t understand what you are trying to tell me. I really don’t.