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I disagree with you regarding avoiding using the command line. I enjoy working in terminal and to the extent possible do as much as I can in there. I also try t

by brodney 13y ago

I disagree with you regarding avoiding using the command line. I enjoy working in terminal and to the extent possible do as much as I can in there. I also try to understand what is happening "behind the scenes" when working in a GUI. The way I look at a GUI is that it is built entirely on terminal functions. I see you disagree, but I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level. Something has to cause it to work, somewhere between bits and hardware, and the screen. Double click to open file? Same as `open file`. Find and replace in a text editor? Same as sed or `s//`. A GUI can make it easier to do those things, but not always. For example I find using git in a GUI to be a worse experience than it's command line counterpart. I'm more at home with `git diff` than whatever built in attempt at improvement is available. I'd rather edit and resolve conflicts in vim than a visual editor (even XCode which is a pretty nice diff tool). In short I just don't see myself ever moving off of terminal, and I would never see knowledge of it as a handicap. On the contrary, I'm always looking to learn how to do something new and powerful in it.

Tloewald 13y ago
> I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level Which simply makes my point that being CLI-centric has limited your imagination. In fact the original Mac had a UI built directly on top of the system libraries. On startup it displayed an icon and played a chime (which was its hardware self-test result). Insofar as there was a "CLI" it ran UNDER the GUI. (There is something lower level going on that the GUI, but it's not a terminal.) Even on a primitive command line machine, there's stuff going on below the level of the command line. In Linux you're running a shell, which is actually not part of the kernel. The fact that the kernel can spew text onto the screen during startup is merely an artifact of what's easy to do using the computer's BIOS or equivalent thereof.

by brodney 13y ago

Tloewald 13y ago

> I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level Which simply makes my point that being CLI-centric has limited your imagination. In fact the original Mac had a UI built directly on top of the system libraries. On startup it displayed an icon and played a chime (which was its hardware self-test result). Insofar as there was a "CLI" it ran UNDER the GUI. (There is something lower level going on that the GUI, but it's not a terminal.) Even on a primitive command line machine, there's stuff going on below the level of the command line. In Linux you're running a shell, which is actually not part of the kernel. The fact that the kernel can spew text onto the screen during startup is merely an artifact of what's easy to do using the computer's BIOS or equivalent thereof.