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>We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason No we didnt.
by protocolture 1y ago
>We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason
No we didnt.
- amrrs 1y agoIf at all anything, Claude Code's success disproved this
- falcor84 1y agoIt's actually an interesting example, because unlike Warp that tries to be a CLI with AI, Claude defaults to the AI (unless you prefix with an exclamation mark). Maybe it says more about me, but I now find myself asking Claude to write for me even relatively short sed/awk invocations that would have been faster to type by hand. The uncharitable interpretation is that I'm lazy, but the charitable one I tell myself is that I don't want to context-switch and prefer to keep my working memory at the higher level problem. In any case, Claude Code is not really CLI, but rather a conversational interface.
- dns_snek 1y agoClaude Code is a Terminal User Interface, not a Command Line Interface.
- lifthrasiir 1y agoClaude Code is a TUI (with "text"), not a CLI (with "command line"). The very point of CC is that you can replace a command line with human-readable texts.
- donaldihunter 1y agoLet's not be overly reductive, Claude Code is a TUI with a CLI for all input including slash commands.
- dns_snek 1y agoYou may think that's pedantic but it really isn't. Half-decent TUIs are much closer to GUIs than they are to CLIs because they're interactive and don't suffer from discoverability issues like most CLIs do. The only similarity they have with CLIs is that they both run in a terminal emulator. "htop" is a TUI, "ps" is a CLI. They can both accomplish most of the same things but the user experience is completely different. With htop you're clicking on columns to sort the live-updating process list, while with "ps" you're reading the manual pages to find the right flags to sort the columns, wrapping it in a "watch" command to get it to update periodically, and piping into "head" to get the top N results (or looking for a ps flag to do the same).
- scuff3d 1y agoCame here to say this. As a software dev I'm deeply offended lol
- u8vov8 1y agoExactly, the whole world runs on CLI based software.
- scuff3d 1y agoThe comparison with Zork and the later comment about having to "guess" what to input to get a CLI to work we're also bizarre. He's obviously stretching really hard to make the analogy work. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that expansion of GUI based interfaces wasn't a good thing. There's plenty of things I prefer to interact with that way, and the majority of people wouldn't use computers if CLIs were still the default method. But what he's describing is literally not how any ever used the commandline.
- anthk 1y agoAlso most of the infocom games were pretty much improved against Zork in the 80's. In the 90's, the amateur Inform6 games basically put Infocom games almost as if they were the original amateur ones, because a lot of them were outstanding and they could ran on underpowered 16 bit machines like nothing.
- commandlinefan 1y agoWell, it's not just that (not that I disagree with the author in general, but I do on this point). point-and-click interfaces _are_ objectively worse interfaces for power use. I've been stuck selecting a group of files, moving them, double-clicking and renaming, selecting another, etc. all the while knowing that I could write a script that could do all of this much faster if I had access to a command line interface. Point-and-click is just easier to get started with.
- croes 1y agoAsk your non-dev peers if they know what the command line is and if they have ever used it or seen especially when most people use the web on their smartphone.
- multiplegeorges 1y agoI mean, it's clear he means for the majority of users and OSes... not the HN crowd specifically.
- anildash 1y agoAlso, to be clear, I’m mostly goofing about it CLIs, and — as I mentioned in the piece — I use one every day. But yes, there are four or five billion internet users who don’t and never will. And CLIs are a poor user interface for 99+% of the tasks that people accomplish on computing devices, or with browsers, which is pertinent for the point I was making. If I’d anticipated breaching containment and heading towards the orange site, I may not have risked the combination of humor and anything that’s not completely literal in its language. Alas.
- gbacon 1y agoLong live Doug McIlroy!
- croes 1y agoI think there is a misunderstanding who is meant by "we"
- intermerda 1y agoYou know of many people who browse the web using CLI?
- 9dev 1y agoI concur. All five of us feel offended!
- Terr_ 1y agoI think the charitable interpretation is that the author is referring to particular use-cases which stopped being served by CLIs. Heck, just look at what's happening at this very moment: I'm using a textarea with a submit button. Even as a developer/power-user, I have zero interest in replacing that with: echo "I think the..." | post_to_hn --reply-to=45742461
- anthk 1y agoA TUI client (with some embedded CLI) would perfectly work for HN.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThat's still not a command-line interface. An ed-based mailer is a command-line interface: what you're describing sounds more like *shudder* vi.
- anthk 1y agoSome TUI programs can embed a small cli. Like Midnight Commander, and others. Or externally call commands and shells, or even pipe the output. Ed itself, vi, slrn... Also, some commenters here at HN stating that the CLI/TUI it's just the fallback option... that's ridiculous. Nvi/vim, entr, make... can autocompile (and autocomplete too with some tools) a project upon writting any file in a directory thanks to the entr tool.
- _joel 1y agoThat just doesn't register with some people.
- imtringued 1y agoBut the article is coming from a decisively antagonistic angle though. >This was also why people hated operating systems like MS-DOS, and why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface. What is the significance of "Even all the Linux users"? First of all it's probably incorrect, because of the all quantifier. I've went out of my way to look at the website via the terminal to disprove the statement. It's clearly factually incorrect now. Second, what does hate have anything to do with this? Graphical user interfaces serve different needs than text interfaces. You can like graphical user interfaces and specifically use Linux precisely because you like KDE or Gnome. You can make a terrible graphical user interface for something that ought to be a command line interface and vice versa. Vivado isn't exactly known for being easy to automate. Third, why preemptively attack people as nerds? >There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet. I mean, not only does this come off as an incredible strawman. After all, who wouldn't be excited by computers in an era where they were the hot new thing? Computers were exciting, not because they had text interfaces. They were fun, because they were computers. It's like learning how to drive on the highway for the first time. The worst part by far is the unnecessary insinuation though. It's the standard anti-intellectual anti-technology stereotype. It creates hostility for absolutely no reason.
- TrackerFF 1y agoIf we take the total number of computer users globally, and look at who use GUI vs CLI, the latter will be a teeny tiny fraction. But most of those will likely be developers, that use the CLI in a very particular way. If we now subdivide further, and look at the people that use the CLI for things like browsing the web, that's going to be an even smaller number of people. Negligible, in the big picture.
- imtringued 1y agoI think that take is pretty out of touch since "command-line" interfaces are seeing a massive resurgence now that we have LLMs.
- commandlinefan 1y agoYeah, maybe he did, but I didn't. I use GUI's under protest.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago99% of people did, that's the context here
- instagraham 1y agoHi, sorry for the unrelated reply, but I wanted to ask you about a comment you made 6months back about archiving Gamasutra posts. I came across it while searching HN for "gamasutra". I'd bookmarked a lot of Gamasutra articles over the years and am kinda bummed out that I can't find any of them now that the site has shifted. You mentioned having a collection of their essays? Is there any way to share or access them?
- protocolture 1y agoThe collection if it still exists is on an old hard drive. I will give it a look.