4 ms·
After decades it should have been obvious by now that the vast majority of users prefer GUIs.
by brap 1y ago
After decades it should have been obvious by now that the vast majority of users prefer GUIs.
- Aperocky 1y agodefine "user" people needing/using curl would have been a very distinct subset of users.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoYeah, hence why no one uses terminals for doing work with git, codex, claude-code, neovim and curl, everyone and their mother are using desktop GUIs for those things, clearly.
- c-hendricks 1y agoInversely, plenty of people use GUIs for all of those things.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoYes, I agree, and have no qualms with people who prefer GUIs. But to say that "majority of users (developers?)" prefer GUIs seems outlandish at best.
- ____mr____ 1y agoI am the only person in my 10 person team that prefers the cli for stuff like git and while the ratio was a little more balanced during my time at college, it was still skewed towards GUIs. I don't think its unreasonable to think that developers might prefer GUIs over CLI
- maleldil 1y agoMany developers are on Windows, and those tend to prefer GUIs. CLI reliance is mostly a macOS/Linux thing.
- hurricanepootis 1y agoI know some window developers use use WSL for all of their devving, and they are obviously gonna be working through the terminal.
- aitchnyu 1y agoI use Jetbrains git pull etc since they dont fail on modified files and other problems.
- nailer 1y agoThe ‘vast majority’ using GUIs as mentioned by the parent doesn’t preclude individuals using CLIs.
- catapart 1y agoYeeeep. My response to this article is the same one I have to anyone out here screaming "it's so easy to just do it my way!": if it's so easy, then do it for me! The ffmpeg fans are the loudest screechers I've found, in this area. They'll point to the trainwreck of a UX that is Handbrake as an example of GUI for terminal commands. And, look - command line utilities are great and Handbrake is a super good product that functions well and does more than I'd ever want it to. But neither of those things are the same thing as having good UX. If it's so easy to compile a bunch of shell scripts and store them in a directory in a git repo, then package together a bunch of them that every dev would need, sprinkle in a few with placeholders that most devs would need (with some project-specific input), and then serve them to me in a composable GUI that, in real time, builds the command to be run in my shell. Let me watch the clicks edit the command, and then let me watch the "submit" execute the command. There's no surer way for me to learn exactly what commands I need than to see them all the time. And if I have to learn them (so that I can use them) BEFORE I've seen them - in context - a few times at least, then I'm going to have a much harder time remembering. UX, when done right, helps the user. Put simply: if I can do everything I would be able to do with postman using curl, then I should also be able to wrap curl in a thin DearImgui window that is reactive to user input. And if it's as easy as the author says, their time would have probably been better spent just making the GUI wrapper app and presenting it as a way to get better with curl, rather than writing an edgelordy article about it.
- skydhash 1y agoYou can’t compose GUI unless you go the emacs and smalltalk route (MacOS AppleScript is a very poor example). The one thing with CLI tools is how easy to compose them and have something greater. Also more versatile than a GUI app. Also they’re more stable than anything else. You can coast for decades on a script.
- catapart 1y agoAnything you can do in a terminal can be done with what I suggested because what I suggested was literally using buttons to write a terminal command.