5 ms·

> Text gives you power, composability and flexibility that you simply cannot achieve with a GUI. Can you think of any big things that you lose though? > Editi

> Text gives you power, composability and flexibility that you simply cannot achieve with a GUI. Can you think of any big things that you lose though? > Editing text without having to move your hands back and forth between keyboard and mouse makes it so much faster and lets you concentrate on your actual work... I could probably get between floors in my house an order of magnitude faster if I replaced the stair cases with slides and a trampolines. Somehow, that does not seem practical though. > The shell is so successful precisely because it uses text as a common representation for all data. Successful in what way? As successful as GUIs? > Computers are good at manipulating text and humans are good at understanding text. Humans are good at understanding patterns and symbols and they're not good at memorizing text commands. That's why everybody can use GUIs but few can use a shell.

pfranz 12y ago
Ahh, these arguments. They each have pros and cons. GUIs are generally more discoverable. Terminals are /way/ more flexible, faster, and customizable if that's your job and you take the time to learn them. > Can you think of any big things that you lose though? Definitely. Customizing behaviors. I work with image sequences a lot. "ls" is used to list files in a directory "lss" is a command we wrote to group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial. These are technically possible with a gui, you need to re-write your whole file-browser or have one with some plugin system that support this (I don't know of any). > I could probably get between floors in my house an order of magnitude faster if I replaced the stair cases with slides and a trampolines. Somehow, that does not seem practical though. That's a terrible analogy and a half-truth on both sides. Jumping to the mouse does slow things down, but I use GUI file browsers without a mouse just fine. The only thing I can't do out of the box is resize and move windows around--navigating through directories is fine. > Humans are good at understanding patterns and symbols and they're not good at memorizing text commands. That's why everybody can use GUIs but few can use a shell. I think the difference is that guis offer more spacial queues and persistent information than terminals do. Someone who has never used a computer would be equally confused at how a mouse or scrolling worked. Humans are not terrible as memorizing text commands, there's just no need to use them everyday and a gui is usually good enough. Fewer people can drive a stick-shift or parallel park now that it's generally unnecessary. It's not that it was difficult. I imagine in a few generations after automation takes off driving a car at all will be difficult for most people.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Ahh, these responses... (This space reserved for further passive aggressive comments.) You didn't say how you arrived at the conclusion that shells are "so successful". How are you measuring that? > ...a command we wrote to group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial. These are technically possible with a gui... Those things are eminently possible with a GUI without writing your own file browser since most major file browsers offer a range of extensibility options. Also, GUI automation is a thing and it works well. Just last month I wrote a simple script to automate image extraction from a program that didn't provide any API for it. As a matter of fact, I didn't even have to write most of the script because the computer aided me by recording my mouse clicks. > Jumping to the mouse does slow things down. Looking up commands and configuration protocols slows things down way more though. > Someone who has never used a computer would be equally confused at how a mouse or scrolling worked. Equally as confused as they'd be when presented with nothing more than a blinking cursor? I don't think so... Once you move the mouse and see the pointer move, it's pretty obvious how movement works. Sixty seconds is enough time to accurately convey complete operating instructions for a mouse. Teaching someone how to use a shell would take much more time I imagine. Anyway, I use a shell when it suits me and a GUI when that suits me, but most importantly, I am not a bigot or an elitist about it. I don't think that there is one true way to do things.
  - pfranz 12y ago
    "Ahh, these arguments." was actually intended for both sides (gui and cli) since I don't particularly care which people prefer. Like I said, they both have pros and cons. It hasn't been explicitly said, but all of these arguments are implicitly about file browsing and file management. I can't imagine anyone exclusively using commandline tools for things like audio editing, browsing the web, etc. I'm genuinely interested, how would you write something like that for a file browser on any platform?
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      > ...how would you write something like that for a file browser... A GUI program can do everything that a command line app can do and more, but unless we discuss exact requirements I can't answer the question very precisely. In terms of input and output I think there are generally more options with a GUI though. Funny story on this topic - last night I was playing around with Fedora 21 + Gnome 3 and when I used git (in a terminal), whenever it needed a username or password it would pop up a GUI with a single text input. It's called askpass and I still haven't found out what exactly necessitates such a workflow, but I thought it was pretty hilarious. > ...on any platform. Command line programs don't work on every platform. Far from it. They don't even work on every Linux distro and especially not with normal usage on variants such as Android. So that's a bit of an unfair requirement to add just for GUI apps, don't you think? I think we're in agreement that they both have pros and cons. It certainly can be easier to write a command line application that works on all platforms. I wasn't arguing against that - I was arguing with the guy on this thread who seemed to think that command lines are the single best way to interface with the computer. The guy who responded to almost every dissenting point of view...(not you). I didn't realize that it was not you at first, but my first response was to that person.

pfranz 12y ago

Ahh, these arguments. They each have pros and cons. GUIs are generally more discoverable. Terminals are /way/ more flexible, faster, and customizable if that's your job and you take the time to learn them. > Can you think of any big things that you lose though? Definitely. Customizing behaviors. I work with image sequences a lot. "ls" is used to list files in a directory "lss" is a command we wrote to group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial. These are technically possible with a gui, you need to re-write your whole file-browser or have one with some plugin system that support this (I don't know of any). > I could probably get between floors in my house an order of magnitude faster if I replaced the stair cases with slides and a trampolines. Somehow, that does not seem practical though. That's a terrible analogy and a half-truth on both sides. Jumping to the mouse does slow things down, but I use GUI file browsers without a mouse just fine. The only thing I can't do out of the box is resize and move windows around--navigating through directories is fine. > Humans are good at understanding patterns and symbols and they're not good at memorizing text commands. That's why everybody can use GUIs but few can use a shell. I think the difference is that guis offer more spacial queues and persistent information than terminals do. Someone who has never used a computer would be equally confused at how a mouse or scrolling worked. Humans are not terrible as memorizing text commands, there's just no need to use them everyday and a gui is usually good enough. Fewer people can drive a stick-shift or parallel park now that it's generally unnecessary. It's not that it was difficult. I imagine in a few generations after automation takes off driving a car at all will be difficult for most people.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
Ahh, these responses... (This space reserved for further passive aggressive comments.) You didn't say how you arrived at the conclusion that shells are "so successful". How are you measuring that? > ...a command we wrote to group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial. These are technically possible with a gui... Those things are eminently possible with a GUI without writing your own file browser since most major file browsers offer a range of extensibility options. Also, GUI automation is a thing and it works well. Just last month I wrote a simple script to automate image extraction from a program that didn't provide any API for it. As a matter of fact, I didn't even have to write most of the script because the computer aided me by recording my mouse clicks. > Jumping to the mouse does slow things down. Looking up commands and configuration protocols slows things down way more though. > Someone who has never used a computer would be equally confused at how a mouse or scrolling worked. Equally as confused as they'd be when presented with nothing more than a blinking cursor? I don't think so... Once you move the mouse and see the pointer move, it's pretty obvious how movement works. Sixty seconds is enough time to accurately convey complete operating instructions for a mouse. Teaching someone how to use a shell would take much more time I imagine. Anyway, I use a shell when it suits me and a GUI when that suits me, but most importantly, I am not a bigot or an elitist about it. I don't think that there is one true way to do things.
- pfranz 12y ago
  "Ahh, these arguments." was actually intended for both sides (gui and cli) since I don't particularly care which people prefer. Like I said, they both have pros and cons. It hasn't been explicitly said, but all of these arguments are implicitly about file browsing and file management. I can't imagine anyone exclusively using commandline tools for things like audio editing, browsing the web, etc. I'm genuinely interested, how would you write something like that for a file browser on any platform?
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    > ...how would you write something like that for a file browser... A GUI program can do everything that a command line app can do and more, but unless we discuss exact requirements I can't answer the question very precisely. In terms of input and output I think there are generally more options with a GUI though. Funny story on this topic - last night I was playing around with Fedora 21 + Gnome 3 and when I used git (in a terminal), whenever it needed a username or password it would pop up a GUI with a single text input. It's called askpass and I still haven't found out what exactly necessitates such a workflow, but I thought it was pretty hilarious. > ...on any platform. Command line programs don't work on every platform. Far from it. They don't even work on every Linux distro and especially not with normal usage on variants such as Android. So that's a bit of an unfair requirement to add just for GUI apps, don't you think? I think we're in agreement that they both have pros and cons. It certainly can be easier to write a command line application that works on all platforms. I wasn't arguing against that - I was arguing with the guy on this thread who seemed to think that command lines are the single best way to interface with the computer. The guy who responded to almost every dissenting point of view...(not you). I didn't realize that it was not you at first, but my first response was to that person.