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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Quote: "..you want to do something complicated that a GUI program can't handle..."

Name one thing that a GUI program can't handle, I dare you. Me, on the other hand, I can point you to a trillion dollar business that uses only GUI and not a single CLI, to say the least.

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Google has been around since 1998, and after 23 years, their search is still a CLI stuck in a form.

> Me, on the other hand, I can point you to a trillion dollar business that uses only GUI and not a single CLI, to say the least.

No you can't. There are 5 companies with a market cap over a trillion. We can easily rule out Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google as they have all developed CLIs.

That leaves Saudi Aramco. Doesn't take long to see they have openings for CLI heavy jobs.[1][2]

[1]: https://apply.aramco.jobs/us/jobs/1786333?lang=en-us

[2]: https://apply.aramco.jobs/us/jobs/1780310?lang=en-us

A CLI stuck in a form is a GUI. You got a button, links etc

Yes, I can. Game industry. See my other response to one of your siblings.

You said a business not an industry.

Exactly, I said business, not company. Gaming is a business, Apple is a company. Understand the difference?

The fact that nearly everyone misunderstood you indicates that you didn't communicate well. A trillion dollar business suggests a singular wherein a singular could be a single corporation or industry in common usage. Without surrounding context to the contrary it isn't trivial to distinguish the intentions.

> Game industry.

Aside from that being an entire industry as opposed to a single company, are you not aware that BigCo games generally contain a developer console of some sort? Even the ones that don't provide end user access to it still usually have one buried somewhere.

Plus many of the dev tools for manipulating assets are either CLI based or have one integrated ...

- ImageMagick

- Optipng

- ffmpeg

- sox

And so on.

The game industry uses CLIs in text adventure games, besides all their development tools. Many games put out utilities to enhance thier games, some of which have CLIs.

> Name one thing that a GUI program can't handle, I dare you.

Pipe input/output between programs. Chaining cli tools is essential for my work and personal usage.

> Me, on the other hand, I can point you to a trillion dollar business that uses only GUI and not a single CLI, to say the least.

That's observably not true. Why didn't you just type out the name?

Because it is obvious, but apparently not to the HN crowd. Let me name it then. Game industry, it's bigger than both music and film industry and it runs exclusively on GUI. Even text based games are GUI actually, not CLI.

You said "a trillion dollar business", not "a trillion dollar industry" so of course people misunderstood you!

And even though the game industry primarily makes GUIs, it still uses CLIs everywhere in the development process, so it's pretty silly to say that it "uses only GUI and not a single CLI." And the console that's present in just about every game doesn't seem very "graphical" either.

That's their problem, not mine. Gaming is a business, Apple is a company. I heard plenty of times here on HN that Google's business is advertising. So go and argue this with the other million of post that uses this semantics.

A UI presents a structure to enable the user to query and manipulate objects.

A CLI represents that structure by accepting textual commands and presenting output textually.

A GUI represents that structure by displaying objects graphically, showing their spatial representation and connection.

And, traditionally, a GUI tends to show more structure up front while a CLI simply prompts you for a command.

The distinction isn't perfect, but a text adventure game is well inside the CLI camp.

1. The game industry obviously is not a single business.

2. Every single company in that industry uses cli tools.

Both assertion from your original statement are incorrect. What’s your beef with the command line anyways? It’s just an interface.

Windows PowerShell:

    Get-ChildItem | Out-GridView -output multiple | Format-Table

There is a GUI with piped input, and piped output, which can be used to filter the pipeline objects using ctrl-click to multiple select "I want this, this, and that" in a view that is sortable and filterable.

You can write a GUI for anything, so if you are willing to spend enough time searching for software, you can solve anything with GUIs. But the big difference is with CLI, there is no need for third party software, the functionality is right there.

Here is a simple task which can easily occur in business: you have a folder with thousands of files named somewhat haphazardly. Copy all the files with have numbers 2011 to 2019 anywhere in the filename to an usb stick.

I think there's a golf game that could be made from these type of real world puzzles.

I would search for "2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019", select everything that shows up in the search results, and copy those to the USB. Wonder what I'd do with millions of files though.

"can't handle" is super subjective. Sure a GUI can have every feature available and be super capable. But it can also lead to it taking 10+ clicks to do something, and another 10+ clicks to do it again. Super painful.

So just because companies have proven that GUI is successful and capable, it's still possible that it "can't handle" a lot of things nearly as effectively as CLI in some cases.

A GUI doesn’t disallow using hotkeys. Hell, it has superior opportunities for using both keyboard and mouse. You don’t have to imagine a dumb ok and cancel button on a window, what about blender? It extensively uses intuitive hot keys, and would be plain impossible to do anything 3D modeling related in a CLI.

The numerous examples given are the automation and composition of basic operations.

Here's an easy one: take all the files in a directory, including files nested in subdirectories, pick ten random ones, and open 'em in a new Firefox window.

    firefox (find . -type f | shuf -n10)

I doubt your computer comes with a GUI program that can do that for you. My point is that CLIs can easily be plugged into each other whichever way you want, but GUIs (except in some niches like audio) aren't built that way for some reason.

I think you miss the point of API's regardless of your programming language. If it's used inside a CLI then definitely I can write a GUI program that does the same.

You could write such a program, but my point is that it's a horrible inconvenience. CLI programs compose to the moon, but it's hard to get GUI programs to compose at all.

Alternatively, writing a program just is what you do at the shell with the find command, without building a GUI AND all the ceremony around getting a typical programming language needs to orchestrate processes.

     find ~ -iname Makefile -exec sed -i ´s,-g,,g´ {} +

Bulk rename.

There are actually a couple of good GUI bulk file renamers. I'm fond of the one built into xfce's Thunar file manager [1], but there is also ReNamer [2] and Ant Renamer [3].

[1] https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/bulk-renamer/start

[2] http://www.den4b.com/products/renamer

[3] http://www.antp.be/software/renamer

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