4 ms·

I get what you mean, but I think its a little ridiculous to call a chronological sequence of commands and their output in an org-mode file with running commenta

I get what you mean, but I think its a little ridiculous to call a chronological sequence of commands and their output in an org-mode file with running commentary NOT a CLI session. I could have done essentially the same thing by recording my session using the "script" command and adding commentary by starting commands with #. If it was 1972, I could have just marked up the paper output of my ASR-33 session with pencil and stuck it in my notebook for later. If this is "organizing things spatially on screen in a way that's meaningful to you" then I honestly don't know of a way of interacting with a computer that isn't that.

transistordad 3y ago
I mean, it seems like we agree more than you might realize, and only seem to differ on where the line should be drawn between CLI and GUI. I'll totally grant that the place I decided to draw the line was arbitrary. I don't know that that question has a right answer. But the printer example is a great one. The value of printing the output is that then you can do things with it that help you think about it in ways that you couldn't do with the on screen interface. If you wanted to you could cut the paper up and rearrange it, draw diagrams etc. There is a whole genre of interfaces, called Tangible User Interfaces or TUI, that is all about giving physical form to digital information and using physical objects / tokens to represent and modify information inside the computer. Here's a paper with an example task that's similar in many ways to the task in the paper in the original blog post. https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/chi02.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/chi02.pdf So yeah, if an interface lets you organize things spatially in physical (or graphical) space, it can make you a lot more productive.
- ElevenLathe 3y ago
  Yeah definitely no hard feelings or anything, but again: In my opinion, if an ASR-33 teletype is a GUI, the term loses basically all meaning. That said, you're right that physical paper is wonderful. I often find myself wishing for some way of moving easily between digital and paper representations of a problem I'm working on. The best I've come up with practically so far is heavy use of index cards and a scanner when I want to get things back into the digital realm. I think something like this could be slick and nice, but my current implementation is actually pretty clunky, so I tend only to do it during the initial phase of a new project -- print off all the info I think I'll need, grab a stack of index cards and a mechanical pencil, walk away from my workstation and sit down at the kitchen table to think and scribble, then scan in anything that needs scanning in and work the rest of the project digitally. I'd love to have the ability to move back and forth with less ceremony, but so far I haven't seen anything that would facilitate this. I think the reMarkable (2?) tablet might be at least part of what I want, though I haven't had a chance to look into it very deeply. They probably also depend on a cloud service that could go up in smoke at any time, which I'd like to avoid for something super integral to my daily workflow.
transistordad 3y ago
Forgot to mention that I use a CLI on a daily basis and think it's amazing for some tasks. So if my post came across as CLI == BAD!, that wasn't my intention

transistordad 3y ago

I mean, it seems like we agree more than you might realize, and only seem to differ on where the line should be drawn between CLI and GUI. I'll totally grant that the place I decided to draw the line was arbitrary. I don't know that that question has a right answer. But the printer example is a great one. The value of printing the output is that then you can do things with it that help you think about it in ways that you couldn't do with the on screen interface. If you wanted to you could cut the paper up and rearrange it, draw diagrams etc. There is a whole genre of interfaces, called Tangible User Interfaces or TUI, that is all about giving physical form to digital information and using physical objects / tokens to represent and modify information inside the computer. Here's a paper with an example task that's similar in many ways to the task in the paper in the original blog post. https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/chi02.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/chi02.pdf So yeah, if an interface lets you organize things spatially in physical (or graphical) space, it can make you a lot more productive.

ElevenLathe 3y ago
Yeah definitely no hard feelings or anything, but again: In my opinion, if an ASR-33 teletype is a GUI, the term loses basically all meaning. That said, you're right that physical paper is wonderful. I often find myself wishing for some way of moving easily between digital and paper representations of a problem I'm working on. The best I've come up with practically so far is heavy use of index cards and a scanner when I want to get things back into the digital realm. I think something like this could be slick and nice, but my current implementation is actually pretty clunky, so I tend only to do it during the initial phase of a new project -- print off all the info I think I'll need, grab a stack of index cards and a mechanical pencil, walk away from my workstation and sit down at the kitchen table to think and scribble, then scan in anything that needs scanning in and work the rest of the project digitally. I'd love to have the ability to move back and forth with less ceremony, but so far I haven't seen anything that would facilitate this. I think the reMarkable (2?) tablet might be at least part of what I want, though I haven't had a chance to look into it very deeply. They probably also depend on a cloud service that could go up in smoke at any time, which I'd like to avoid for something super integral to my daily workflow.

transistordad 3y ago

Forgot to mention that I use a CLI on a daily basis and think it's amazing for some tasks. So if my post came across as CLI == BAD!, that wasn't my intention