Hacker News Reader

Comment by scuff3d | Hacker News Reader

Came here to say this. As a software dev I'm deeply offended lol

Exactly, the whole world runs on CLI based software.

Well, it's not just that (not that I disagree with the author in general, but I do on this point). point-and-click interfaces _are_ objectively worse interfaces for power use. I've been stuck selecting a group of files, moving them, double-clicking and renaming, selecting another, etc. all the while knowing that I could write a script that could do all of this much faster if I had access to a command line interface. Point-and-click is just easier to get started with.

The comparison with Zork and the later comment about having to "guess" what to input to get a CLI to work we're also bizarre. He's obviously stretching really hard to make the analogy work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that expansion of GUI based interfaces wasn't a good thing. There's plenty of things I prefer to interact with that way, and the majority of people wouldn't use computers if CLIs were still the default method. But what he's describing is literally not how any ever used the commandline.

Also most of the infocom games were pretty much improved against Zork in the 80's. In the 90's, the amateur Inform6 games basically put Infocom games almost as if they were the original amateur ones, because a lot of them were outstanding and they could ran on underpowered 16 bit machines like nothing.

Ask your non-dev peers if they know what the command line is and if they have ever used it or seen especially when most people use the web on their smartphone.

Network Engineers, Systems Engineers, Devops.

Anyone who deals with any kind of machine with a console port.

CLIs are current technology, that receive active development alongside GUI for a large range of purposes.

Heck Windows currently ships with 3 implementations. Command Prompt, Powershell AND Terminal.

and how do you open those three terminals?) or do you boot in DOS mode?

CLI is ALWAYS fallback when nothing else works (except when fetish of people on HN). even most devs use IDEs most of the time.

Windows is making pretty decent inroads with its headless windows server installs. Powershell is the default interface, no real gui to speak of.

Theres a pretty decent list of incompatible features, but its shrinking (mostly due to those features being EOL'd not upgraded)

I recently demonstrated ripgrep-all with fzf to search through thousands of PDFs in seconds on the command line and watched my colleague’s mind implode.

Run iomenu instead of fzf, it might run faster than the Go binary.

I'm aware. Just having a bit of fun. Obviously the vast majority of computer users don't even know what a command line is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com