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A seasoned CLI user will trump a seasoned GUI user every single time for the majority of tasks. Take a task like thumbnailing every image in a directory to a c

by keyist 17y ago

A seasoned CLI user will trump a seasoned GUI user every single time for the majority of tasks. Take a task like thumbnailing every image in a directory to a certain size. With CLI it's just looping over convert(1). With GUI you have to clicky-clicky to get to the directory, drill down to the options, swap to keyboard to enter sizes, etc. Not to mention the richness of CLI options mean that an equivalent GUI offering would be insanely complicated. Try designing a GUI frontend for sed or awk. Or a file rename utility that matches Emacs Wdired mode in power and (interface) simplicity. Configuration: changing a text file vs clicking on/off a checkbox. You can write a tiny script that flips options between two configs you like, versus more clicky-clicky. You can copy configs around, diff them, grep them. tl;dr - yes CLI has more cognitive load (in that you need to be more familiar with your tools vis-a-vis GUI equivalents), but you get so much more in return. EDIT: quick list of CLI utilities if anyone is interested * feed reading: newsbeuter * music playing: ncmpcpp+mpd * irc/im: irssi+bitlbee * torrents: rtorrent * git browser/pager: tig Many more here: http://cli.homelinux.net/CLIapps.html http://cli.homelinux.net/CLIapps.html

lanaer 17y ago
If a GUI tool is written where you can just select items in the explorer/finder, launch tool (from keyboard), enter thumbnail sizes, then GUI may win, since you won't have to switch from file browser to CLI in the first place. Problem with GUI is that you need a new tool for each such task; we don’t yet have a generalized way of handling such things.
KentBeck 17y ago
Whether a CLI will beat a GUI depends on whether the operations are at the right level of abstraction. When watching Gary Bernhardt's refactoring session, he was using text editing operations to refactor. Text editing operations aren't an effective basis for refactorings. Building refactorings out of AST rewrites is much more reliable, then offering those refactorings as atomic operations. I don't see how to offer such refactorings from a CLI, but that could just be my narrowness of vision.
ilaksh 17y ago
Mogrify is easier. But you are comparing someone that knows bash scripting to someone that apparently can't write a script at all. If there were a Windows program that added an item to the windows explorer context menu 'Mogrify' that would be easier than typing mogrify. One thing I can do with file system explorer windows is leave a couple of them open and then switch from one to the other or copy and paste between them. You don't get all of that with cd and cp. There are some CLI tools that improve the standard situation with bash or whatever but you don't get all of the advantages of the GUI. The advantage of GUI config dialogs is that they provide immediate feedback and prevent the user from inputing invalid configuration or having to look up config options. Those things waste time, even for experienced users.

by keyist 17y ago

lanaer 17y ago

If a GUI tool is written where you can just select items in the explorer/finder, launch tool (from keyboard), enter thumbnail sizes, then GUI may win, since you won't have to switch from file browser to CLI in the first place. Problem with GUI is that you need a new tool for each such task; we don’t yet have a generalized way of handling such things.

KentBeck 17y ago

Whether a CLI will beat a GUI depends on whether the operations are at the right level of abstraction. When watching Gary Bernhardt's refactoring session, he was using text editing operations to refactor. Text editing operations aren't an effective basis for refactorings. Building refactorings out of AST rewrites is much more reliable, then offering those refactorings as atomic operations. I don't see how to offer such refactorings from a CLI, but that could just be my narrowness of vision.

ilaksh 17y ago

Mogrify is easier. But you are comparing someone that knows bash scripting to someone that apparently can't write a script at all. If there were a Windows program that added an item to the windows explorer context menu 'Mogrify' that would be easier than typing mogrify. One thing I can do with file system explorer windows is leave a couple of them open and then switch from one to the other or copy and paste between them. You don't get all of that with cd and cp. There are some CLI tools that improve the standard situation with bash or whatever but you don't get all of the advantages of the GUI. The advantage of GUI config dialogs is that they provide immediate feedback and prevent the user from inputing invalid configuration or having to look up config options. Those things waste time, even for experienced users.