Hacker News Reader

Comment by yuvadam | Hacker News Reader

Save time with a GUI? Seriously???

Keyboard strokes are, by any definition, much faster than mouse pointing-and-clicking. I have yet to find a single GUI that gets stuff done faster than what I can achieve with a command line prompt.

View on HN

How about staging 8 files out of 10 that are currently modified, with no matching glob patterns for the CLI to use? I don't care how fast your keyboarding is, simply selecting the 8 (even better, select all and unselect the 2 you don't want) and dragging them into the index is the fastest way.

Or how about firstly determining which old commit you would like to revert a single file to, then secondly doing the actual revert. I can just view the file's log at a glance, get the revision I want, right-click and select "Reset File to This Commit".

By the way, I love Vim. But your disdain for "pointing-and-clicking" sounds like so much machismo.

git add -i

Great tip, didn't know that!

Some people literally actually don't have a mouse. It gets that good.

These people can use the keyboard - git has comprehensive command line support, even if it isn't always as quick as git gui.

They day I learned that gvim has support for mouse hover tooltips, was a great day.

I can't imagine myself using a GUI for git, but there are some things that are faster with a GUI and mouse than with a keyboard. Almost all of them involve some kind of visual feedback. For instance, lately I've been working on some projects that involve absolutely positioning HTML elements on the page. This is a huge pain using a text editor--you make an estimate, save it, reload the page, see how it looks, and repeat. Just clicking and dragging is much, much easier.

Other than that, I generally think that keyboard is a faster input, though an 80-character terminal window is often a poor choice for visual feedback. Termkit has some interesting ideas: http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

For the future, mnutt: I love Chrome's developer tools, you can directly edit CSS rules from the browser by right clicking on it and selecting inspect element. Helps a lot with these situations!

And it's a gui!

TermKit author got mad at the community last year and went underground. :-( No idea if it will ever launch.

Yes, I use magit to stage chunks in emacs. Even if I have modified a file and end up staging the whole thing, looking at what i'm staging is way more useful than the way stock git presents things.

Your working speed is limited by typing or clicking? Mine is limited not by the speed I output information, but by the speed I get input. GUIs excel at that. A graphical view of source history is much better than what you get from the CLI, which is like living life while looking through a straw.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com