GUIs Are Antisocial · Mtlynch.io

Give me five minutes and I can get most of the unwashed to see that a Terminal window is not much different than a Finder window, for the tasks most of the unwashed are doing (browsing, finding, opening, maybe deleting, maybe moving). Sure, it’ll take me longer to get them up to speed on all the extra facilities the Terminal provides, but the mental model required for a Finder window and that required for a Terminal cwd aren’t a heck of a lot different, except that the latter can optionally do things outside its context.

Also training doesn’t have to be specialization… just like we do basic arithmetic and literacy and (mostly useless and often curated by people with agendas) history we could do basic directory navigation and associated operations, side by side, just to get everyone on the same page, going forward. Now suddenly everyone has access to the social value of sharing their interactions with machines.

Arguably this is what little value LLMs might actually provide, assuming we ever get to the point we can talk one into reliably performing some interaction with the OS for us, then capture that as an output we can share as well.

Knowing where you are in the file browser window is still in your head, it’s just because you’ve clicked from the desktop to the folder to the sub-folder that you’re aware of the current context… sure, it might be configured to display the cwd in a status line or title bar or what have you, but so does a well configured CLI. And sure, a CLI app can just delete stuff without interaction, but so could a GUI, it’s just that one’s be kept default unsafe and the other default safe because of the expected average user… if everyone was always going to be introduced to CLI/TUI first then those default safety features would be there too. What the GUI can never do well is work with things outside the CWD, and while GUIs could be scriptable, they almost never are. I wish they were, I would love to see GUIs be as inherently capable of the social effects the post is speaking to as CLIs, with a shareable artifact of your interaction, but there seem to be incentives that keep that from happening.

Honestly I don’t see there’s any reason we don’t introduce both modes to every user. Where they want to be able to do repeatable and shareable they should have that option, and where they want to click around they should have that… but until GUI frameworks are scriptable by default, with some embedded scripting language (don’t care which) that’s ubiquitously present in every window even if the writer of the app knows nothing about it, then we should be empowering users by showing them the things CLIs are inherently better at.

My guess is the work necessary to make CLIs more ergonomic is smaller than the work needed to make GUIs more scriptable, but I could be wrong.

> Nearly all existing CLIs are much harder to use than GUIs.

Software would tend to be easier to understand if it is better documented; GUIs aren't inherently easier. If the computer display specifies what is expected then a CLI might be easier to understand, and documentation also makes it easier.

However, what is easier for one user might also depend on what they are familiar with. Someone familiar with a specific kind of CLI or GUI might be able to more easily understand that. I will find it easier to use an unfamiliar computer if it has a command-line interface that I can understand, rather than the GUI.

> They will delete your stuff instead of trash it.

Yes, although it is not really an inherent issue of CLI vs GUI, but of specific implementations.

> You can run commands on the wrong folder or even the wrong machine easily, since you're not directly clicking on objects.

I think this is not legitimate. A CLI and GUI will both have to display such things in order to know which folder/machine/objects/etc you want, and at least bash already does display these things (and I would expect that a good quality GUI should also do), so it does not have to be "all in your head".

> Even with autocomplete there's a lot of typing involved. If you're not a touch typist, it's a real slog to type that much literally all day, and can even make your eyes and neck tired from glancing back and forth to the keyboard so many times.

This is legitimate. However, people who intend to operate a computer a lot, should learn typing if they can.

> If you customize any of this behavior, it doesn't look any different, you can't tell at a glance what's in bashrc.

It depends on the specific customization. If you modify the prompt then it will look like differently. Customizations are still useful whether it looks different or not. (You can also make other changes to the looks, e.g. changing the font size, which are not a part of bash and are a part of the terminal emulator (or display settings, if the operating system you use handles them like that instead) so would be configured separately.)

> GUIs also could be perfectly well scriptable, we could have some futuristic UI where everything was an auto generated UI around drag and drop script blocks or something.

I have another idea, which is similar in some ways but is different. You could copy objects between the command-line and GUI in either direction, and program stuff in the command-line to trigger things in the GUI as well.