Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

I think a better way to handle this is to show people how to use the command line. That does have a cohesive look and feel and is generally very well behaved compared to nearly anything else.

Unfortunately that seems to scare people away so everyone hacks GUIs together to keep them from running and that's how we got to where we are now.

View on HN

Have fun editing HDR footage or cutting samples on the command line. Don't get me wrong, but MacOS is exactly my platform of choice because I can have a sane POSIX command line as well as a color managed display and high resolution, low latency multichannel audio on the very same computer and can switch effortlessly.

You're actually manipulating graphical data though, in that situation a GUI makes a lot of sense. Using a GUI for editing E-mail or joining a WI-FI network is silly, just like it is for most things people do with computers.

No, it's not. GUIs give amazingly good discovery, when compared to CLIs. Most people use computers as simple tools. They want it to be easy to figure out how to do what they want, not to have to look it up or work it out. CLIs are great for power users, but they suck for casual users - and "most things people do with computers" are casual usage.

Are you truly managing email through a command line interface? Or are you using something like Pine? Isn't Pine just a GUI created out of characters instead of graphics? True GUI interfaces compared to ncurses type solutions offer way more fidelity and power.

nmh FTW!

>Using a GUI for editing E-mail or joining a WI-FI network is silly, just like it is for most things people do with computers.

Englebart? Sutherland? Kay? Idiots! Fifty years of academic and industrial research into Human Computer Interaction? Arrant nonsense. Let's blow it all off and do your thing. What could possibly go wrong? [0]

[0] http://gandre.ws/blog/blog/2015/04/07/why-the-command-line-i...

I think one of the big reasons that many dev tools are command line programs is that command line interfaces are just easier to code, even if you are writing all the parsing logic from scratch. You don't have to worry about designing a layout, hooking logic up across a UI thread, wrestling with a widget library, etc.

On UNIX, the Windows, macOS culture is to provide GUIs for developer tools even if they might look a bit ugly.

Doubtful.

I like text interfaces as much as the next nerd, but most people want to interact with a computer intuitively: see a thing and interact with that thing.

In other words, "point and click". (Or just "point" if it's a touchscreen.)

My 2 year old doesn't know the first thing about computers, but he'll jab his finger at the screen when he sees something he likes.

I don't know, language seems fairly intuitive but it's not in style. The only people who really struggle with it are illiterate. (ex: very young children) In those situations you really do need a special UI that will be frustrating for normal people.

That's a strong criticizm. There are a lot of equally valid linguistic ways to view the contents of a directory. But only one grammatical and lexical way to command the computer to do it with text.

'Open folder', 'show contents', 'see items', why does 'ls' make more sense? It certainly has nothing to do with literacy.

The same can be said for GUIs though, look at how different mobile GUIs and desktop GUIs are. It's actually a real problem that people think their GUI is intuitive, they never end up documenting it. CLI app authors know this and are forced to face reality and at least write usage text.

GUI tends to be more discoverable - in the worst case you can simply click through all the menus and see what all the available commands are. That tends not to be the case with a CLI - the man page requires a context switch and tends to go on for dozens of pages, some programs have good '--help' output but many do not.

> I think a better way to handle this is to show people how to use the command line. That does have a cohesive look and feel and is generally very well behaved compared to nearly anything else.

Not really. CLIs can be terribly inconsistent look and feel, even within the same tool (see git), which makes their lack of discoverability even more painful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com