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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

For games, especially non-trivial ones, GUIs are fucking great. I couldn't possibly imagine writing game code without them.

Anything else really visual, like CSS, and I need a GUI to feel productive. It's because the changes in the system are dynamic and cascade in unexpected ways. You make a box a little thinner and a heading flows to a new place and now the space between the heading and the image is off, etc.

But I look at that very differently than an overall pronouncement on development. If I'm primarily interacting with data and transformations then GUIs are a disease that do nothing more than slow me down. Only when an analysis is truly one-time does Excel sometimes have an edge, but even there I really miss the adaptability of the terminal. The raw speed. The testability. The sheer maneuverability of it. The permanence.

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> Anything else really visual, like CSS, and I need a GUI to feel productive. It's because the changes in the system are dynamic and cascade in unexpected ways. You make a box a little thinner and a heading flows to a new place and now the space between the heading and the image is off, etc.

Do you have some GUI for manipulating CSS with click&drag? Otherwise, isn't this use case handled by having an editor and a browser simultaneously open, and connected via live code reload. A web IDE can do this, but any other editor can do this too.

This approach does work in gamedev too, but it's not popular - mainly because languages supporting REPL-driven development on live images are not popular in this sector.

I agree though that there are tasks where GUIs are superior. But we're not talking about "regular" GUIs here, but domain-specific ones. Say, 3D editing. I can't imagine doing that from Emacs - the interface would heavily retard the feedback loop, in the same way GUIs slow you down when writing code. But then, Blender shows how one can apply Vim philosophy to 3D editing, resulting in a tool that embraces power users while still being GUI-driven.

Slight tangent, but may be interesting.

I do a decent amount of CSS / HTML editing live in the chrome dev tools. I even sometimes move elements around by dragging them in the DOM tree UI. It can be a nice way of experimenting with UI design, as the feedback loop has less friction and can be much quicker, in some cases.

One workflow is to write out an initial sketch of the HTML structure, with little to no CSS. The first round of the styling is then done in the dev tools, tweaking until it seems ok, then copying those styles from the inspector stylesheet into my code and saving, and then iterating further as necessary.

I was mentioning CSS because it's something that almost everyone here has experience with. I don't know anyone that doesn't use a GUI to tweak or experiment on things when they're broken. I use Chrome Dev tools, but there are many other GUIs out there. It's true that I still write the first pass in emacs, but the first pass isn't often enough.

For CSS i find a text editor and two browsers live showing the changes to be most efficient. I have one or more live real browsers even with a IDE environment.

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