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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

And GUIs often lack configurability among other things.

Speaking of DOS and configuration. Everyone used to whine about that. Having to put cryptic lines of text in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get some game running. But I look back now and I see my old configuration files that I used on my last DOS computer, or the files I use to configure FreeDOS, and it is really not bad at all compared to any modern OS.

In two short text files, maybe typically a few dozen lines in total (and the OS installer is likely to give you good defaults) it sets up all preferences, from command-line keyboard layout to TCP/IP to what settings DJGPP need to compile C++. There is no control panel or other annoying settings GUI to hunt for settings, just two files.

Yes, pretty much, something you can carry with you, or have it backed up.

One can be considered lucky if the GUI allows the export & import of settings.

Meanwhile, if you had a Mac, everything Just Worked. There was no need to load an "extended memory driver" to use all the RAM in your system; it was all there from the start. If you wanted to change things, you could click on a few settings with sensible names without having to run arcane syntax. If a special driver or system extension was needed, just drag it to System Folder:Extensions.

The DOS PC was really clunky, inferior, and a struggle to use compared to any of the alternatives.

Poor students couldn’t afford Macs in those days. We built PCs by hand to save a few bucks.

I feel like the difficulty was in that you couldn’t just Google magic spells to make things work, you either knew how to do things or you didn’t. DOS didn’t even have manpages IIRC

You had the manual, and had magazines:

At the time, I was really annoyed I couldn’t convert my DOS knowledge into Unix (Linux) shell commands - when need came.

Since when you can extend CLI and TUIs, when not given access to source code?

A hell lot of CLI and TUIs are open-source, whereas GUIs are more often (than CLI tools) closed source, though, so it is mainly an issue with GUIs.

Not true for MS-DOS CLI and TUIs.

Also not true for FreeBSD and GNU/Linux GUIs.

Have you found it to be easier to configure GUI than CLI?

Via piping.

Unfortunately doing the same kind macros in GUI is a great deal more error prone.

As for CLI vs GUI, both have their places. I wouldn’t say I preferred on over the other except for when talking about specific tasks.

I’ve also been careful not to state “TUI”. Frankly I don’t see much value making a distinction between GUI and TUI in this type of conversation because they’re ostensibly the same paradigm.

There is also "expect" for automation.

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