Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

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> I hate the idea of having to hold a natural-language conversation with a computer in order to make use of its functionality.

I hate the idea of having to use a mouse to click on a visual GUI to navigate a file system in order to make use of its functionality.

It's less the case today, even among developers, but it wasn't that long ago that I remember that any serious technical user of a computer took it as a point of pride to touch the mouse as little as possible. They're also still correct in that thinking. The command line is a very powerful UI with lots of benefits and while the mouse makes navigating the OS easier it's still much more limited than command line usage.

Touch screen interfaces are another example of an easier UI that ultimately feels even more limited. But people still plug their iPad pros in to magic keyboard folios frequently.

Having worked with these tools everyday for awhile now the "AI will change UX" is such a better take than "AI will conquer the world!". AI does fundamentally open up new work flows and user experiences, many of which do over a lot of potential improvements over their predecessors.

At the same time I doubt we'll see a world where we don't end up using the command line for the majority of serious technical work.

> I hate the idea of having to use a mouse to click on a visual GUI to navigate a file system in order to make use of its functionality.

Ironically, studies have shown that mouse-based interfaces are more efficient for practically all filesystem use-cases compared to CLI interfaces.

Despite objectively faster-time-to-solution, people self-report that they "feel" that the mouse GUIs are slower.

That's because there's fewer actions per second when using a mouse. It's a smooth gliding motion and then a single click, versus many keystrokes in a row with a CLI.

Rapid actions feel faster, even if it takes more wall-clock time to achieve a task.

Keep this in mind next time you sneer at a "bad graphical user interface" for being "slow".

Pratically all? I regularly need to select a subset of a very large number of files to do something with. Example: I have a directory, or possibly a tree, with thousands of photos. The photos have the date in ISO 9000 format embedded in their name. Your job is to find all the files from February 2021 and copy them to specified location, and there are 50 of them. Good luck using a visual GUI for that, unless it has the exact selection mechanism you need. Sure, mouse clicking is easier if you're selecting one file from a small set of files to open in a particular program. But I usually find myself frustrated when the only tool I have is a GUI.

Personally, I would use the terminal, too for a throwaway use case like this. But GUIs are very good at that and faster when you do more than the naïve case, they also allow to see intermediate steps.

For your use case, on macOS open Automator.app and add three actions

  1. "ask for finder items" (the source folder)
  2. "filter finder items" (by name)
  3. "copy finder items" (to target folder)

This takes roughly 5 clicks, 10 seconds at most.

Repeatability and configurability is where the GUI action shines. With only one click more you can

- add filtering by size, opening date, modification date, etc. in addition or a combination thereof

- do the same action for multiple source folders and the same target folder

- choose whether you want to replace existing files

- add it as a folder action that runs automatically on modification of the source folder

Arguably much slower on the terminal.

Alternative on macOS, that works on all other major OS with similar shortcuts and a similar feature set, just not repeatable:

  1. Go to source folder (shift-cmd-G)
  2. Filter (cmd-shift-F)
  3. Copy (cmd-A, cmd-C)
  4. Go to target folder (shift-cmd-G)
  5. Paste (cmd-V)

This repeatability, configurability and automation is where GPT falls short, for now.

I believe you, and I'm coming to this conclusion myself, after being a keyboard warrior for years.

Do you have any sources I can read though? I always find it fascinating when our perceptions are so off like this.

> Touch screen interfaces are another example of an easier UI that ultimately feels even more limited.

Depends o the use case. Touch screen is much more powerful than command line for maps, for example. Or for drawing. Mouse + keyboard is much more powerful than just keyboard for DAWs. And so on and so on.

Right on, brother!

Plus I think there's a nuance to what you're saying:

UX is not just about making the best channel surfing interface, which is essentially what phones/tablets are. We need UIs that are capable of rich interaction and expression of ideas, creation, etc.

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