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GUI apps are good for discoverability. They generally are not optimized for rapid use by power users though. That's of course not an inherent limitation of GUI
by vanviegen 8mo ago
GUI apps are good for discoverability. They generally are not optimized for rapid use by power users though. That's of course not an inherent limitation of GUI apps, it's just that dominant paradigms hardly seem to consider power users.
I'm still annoyed and baffled by the fact that Ubuntu had searchable application menus 10 years ago, which were awesome and worked for just about any program, and then dropped them when they abandoned Unity. And neither KDE not Gnome thought to bring them back. In stead, many apps have since dropped application menus entirely, in favour of... some mishmash of icons and ad hoc menu buttons?
Also, even in the post-LLM era, building a decent GUI app is a lot more work than building a decent terminal app.
- robinsonb5 8mo agoAnother factor is the lack of a good cross-platform GUI toolkit (by which I mean one that (a) doesn't feel out-of-place and jarring on any platform and (b) doesn't turn a 50K app into a 1GB download.) Between that and the level of complexity of modern GUI toolkits - and the size of their dependency trees - distribution of a GUI app is a much bigger headache than distributing a terminal app.
- iberator 8mo agothere is TCL-TK. :) Super easy to use, fast, almost zero ram usage and battle tested for 2 decades.
- robinsonb5 8mo ago"Equally jarring and out-of-place on all platforms" isn't quite what I asked for, but I guess it's the next best thing! ;)
- ux266478 8mo agoThat hasn't been true for a while, it's easily the best of the bunch at this point. It's also always been trivial to change, which can't be said of the others.
- NoGravitas 8mo agoI'd say it's easily the least bad of the bunch, anyway, if you're really committed to cross-platform.
- skydhash 8mo agoMake the core feature of your app a library, then write different interfaces according to the targeted platforms.