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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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