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Comment by HeckFeck | Hacker News Reader

This is why I have reverted to the CLI whenever possible.

There's something deeply assuring knowing that I don't have to relearn my whole workflow every few months when the trends change. ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent.

All I want is to get work done the way I want, and I've found the CLI is increasingly the path of least resistance.

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> ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent.

Those command-line tools don't have any "engagement" opportunities nor are there bloated teams of product managers & designers having to justify their salaries by reworking them for no good reason.

I regret to inform you that the latest release of `find` has been renamed to [magnifying glass emoji].

For example,

    # Find directories the old way.
    find . -type d

    # The cool new way!
    [magnifying glass emoji] . -[keyboard] [folder emoji]

Edit: HN appears to strip emojis, so my new edited comment doesn't pack the same punch.

I look forward to hieroglyphic CLI interfaces, where we compute like it's 2600 BC.

At 2600 BC hieroglyphs already included symbols used for phonetic spelling, so hieroglyphs are not the way to go if you want to get rid of spelled out words unless you ban the subset that can be directly mapped to greek letters[1]. Otherwise it just ends up a fancy font.

[1]https://youtu.be/NIxn9auks24?t=2009

That literally every ancient civilization went from pictures to words as fast as they could should say something about modern icon only design.

You jest, but I'm not sure that is a bad idea. bash/zsh seem happy with emojis as function/alias names, and I can input emojis easy enough. In fact some emojis are easier to type in my chosen layout than the string necessary to disambiguate completion for some commands.

Thanks for the idea, and I'll redirect co-worker scorn at U+1F984 for `git push` towards you ;)

Edit to add: Using emoji for commands/arguments is actually quite workable with global aliases or custom zle widgets in zsh, and moderately workable by using $INPUTRC to specify text replacements for readline if you're a bash user.

Had a developer change some config file names to emoji based file names. Boss thought his computer was broken when he took a look at some output txt file. He wasn't amused even though it was April 1.

similar c++ proposal from April 1998: https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

> ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are.

SystemD screwed with a few that I'm still discovering one by one. "cron", "shutdown" is no longer in the default debian path, I think ulimit was another one.

But at least I don't wake up one morning with the whole interface rearranged.

cron is in /usr/sbin (and is a daemon, not a command you'd ever run manually); shutdown is in /sbin; and ulimit is a shell builtin, not a standalone executable at all.

If I had to guess, I'd say that /sbin and /usr/sbin aren't on your $PATH for some reason. systemd is unlikely to be the culprit.

sometimes even cli tools go away. eg: ifconfig

They still exist on BSD! But yes it has gone away on Linux.

Huh Til that ifconfig is deprecated. I still use it periodically, but my work laptop is on 18.04

It can be restored with the `net-tools` package, thankfully. That's among my first installs on a Linux box. Never quite got into `ip addr show` when I've most of the ifconfig flags memorised from use.

Which may contradict my previous point slightly, but at least it is easy to put the system back into a state I want and the system will maintain this state.

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