Hacker News Reader

Comment by goranmoomin | Hacker News Reader

You need a GUI. The user experience of GUIs are superior to CLIs in discoverability, consistency, etc...

The only reason CLIs are still useful is because we still haven’t found a way to compose GUI applications well. We still can’t automate GUI applications, use the result of one app from another app etc... But that’s not something inherent to the GUI paradigm.

View on HN

You absolutely can automate GUI applications. The Mac had AppleScript and the Amiga had ARexx back in the late 1980s. Even iOS, which a lot of people think of as very obstinately non-scriptable/customizable, can automate a surprising amount of stuff using Shortcuts. What you need, as cle mentioned in another reply, is a way to decouple the data and core operations from presentation -- to wit, for applications to provide AppleScript "dictionaries," ARexx "ports," Shortcut "actions," or the like.

If you mean you can't automate a GUI entirely within a GUI paradigm, then you're closer to the truth, although Shortcuts -- and the third-party Mac utility Keyboard Maestro[1] -- are at least blurring the lines there.

Mac still has AppleScript, and for the past several years you can write Javascript (JXA) to achieve the same goals, with an extremely similar interface but a less-insane syntax

And on Windows, there's also Power Automate now btw.

I think it is, which is why it hasn't happened. We shouldn't couple ourselves to the GUI itself (widgets, layouts, etc.). When you decouple the data and core operations from the presentation, you get APIs. Slap a flag parser around those and you've got yourself a CLI. (PowerShell is an interesting case study here too.)

> We still can’t automate GUI applications

I've used xdotool for that. A CLI-only tool ironically enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com