Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeflonex2 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> Most of the time the GUI experience is the same or better than terminal tools

I started to take your comment seriously until that line. You're avoiding leveling up and learning how to use the CLI. Whatever reason you are avoiding it for, understand that's what is at play here.

If what a person does during the day is mainly interacting with text then they need a tool for working well with text. Possibly this is an editor window inside an IDE. Possibly this is a shell in a terminal emulator. However, dismissing GUIs out of hand and asserting superiority of CLI is wrong. Far more disciplines need a GUI to get maximum utility from their computers than can get by with a CLI. Designers, architects, actual engineers, artists, lawyers, etc.

If you haven't combined terminal tools together then you haven't use the terminal the way it's intended.

If you start 1 command and get 1 output, the terminal isn't particularly powerful.

One you do start combining commands then it's a totally different thing.

If your GUI does everything you need, then a terminal isn't necessarily useful. If your GUI doesn't provide a feature though, you are most likely stuck. You might be able to learn it's own API in a specific language, e.g. Lisp for Gimp, Python for Blender, etc. If though your terminal application doesn't provide what you need you can pipe its output to another terminal application and thus get something that none of those applications individual can. Once you have done it with 2 applications you can do that with 3, 4, etc. You can label those applications and re-use that tomorrow, share with someone else, etc.

The terminal isn't about starting one application.

In a Turing machine theory, a GUI application can do all the same things a terminal application can do.

In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to "muscle memory" whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately always [1]).

Keyboard oriented applications feel more like a language and human brains tend to map well to language and touch typing while GUI's rely on something akin (or identical) to hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is harder than touch typing and every GUI application requires developing a unique mental model.

[1] in the ancient days of digitizing tablets with absolute coordinates, it was possible to "touch mouse." But that's not how we do things today (and it would not work well with infinite scrolling, etc.)

I happily used a small Wacom graphics tablet as a mouse for a long time. Thanks for the memories, I’d nearly forgotten.

Terminal tools are nice because keyboard shortcuts and text commands are quicker than clicking through menus and pressing buttons. For certain types of work (programming for example) this is much quicker and more comfortable than GUI interfaces.

Of course, other tasks are nicer with a GUI and/or mouse/tablet/touchscreen (art creation for example).

If it is a one-off task, it doesn't matter if you use GUI or Terminal commands to do it. But more than once, terminal starts paying off IMO.

Here are some advantages.

  - It is repeatable, you can do the same exact thing you did before. With ZSH history + FZF, recalling a command is a breeze.

  - Auditability. The command in your shell history is there for you to revisit and servers as a permanent record of something you did (or didn't do).

  - A command line doesn't make a mistake at 10th time, due to fatigue, inattention etc.

  - Reusability. You may have to repeat the same command for different folders (or remote servers). A slight modification of the previous command will do it for you.

"gui"? what gui?

my take is terminal is just quicker than "gui".

All other things being equal, GUI apps are not usually composable - the unix philosophy lets you do a lot by not solving every problem yourself.

Depends on what you grew up on/learned I think. CLI was the only thing around when I learned so that's still what I prefer. It's one of those things where I think you use the tool that you are proficient with. No right or wrong, just different strokes for different folks.

I think, for folks who grew up in the early 2000’s at least, CLI is the way to go forward. The GUIs at the time were really quite good, it was after the really limited time of the 90’s, but before we started dumbing down GUIs for… I dunno, style I guess.

If you were raised on programs where most of the features were accessible at a button-click, without going through a bunch of hamburgers, modern GUIs won’t feel familiar, CLI will.

a hype that lasts since the 70s can it be called a hype ?

it's common as a junior to think in such a way

echo $bait > /dev/null 2>&1

Meh. I take typing commands in the terminal over clicking stuff with a mouse and learning keyboard shortcuts for every app.

Skill issue.

GUIs are almost entirely non-scriptable. Some exceptions exist, but they're few and extremely limited compared to what you can do with a CLI. (Note I said CLI. A TUI is almost always a GUI made of text, and is just as non-scriptable.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com