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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

Do you hold your phone to the same standard and do everything from Termux there? Or the GUI disdain is reserved strictly to the PCs?

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Smartphone UIs are a devastating blow to humankind. They make a real computer just redundant enough that people buy smartphones instead of computers and then just don't do anything that can't be easily done on a smartphone. Furthermore, as doing anything productive is so painful on smartphones, people just passively consume stuff instead.

Well, smartphone was more for an example. My main point was to highlight the absurdity of the summarily dismissing a PC GUI by the top poster. CLI is great, sure, but it's not a means to the end for me at least.

In rare cases, even the "CLI native" tasks are easier to do in GUI, like for example sifting through a really big log dumps with long lines, or configuring a really long configuration file, or editing a giant nested JSON.

Even a basic shell prompt is better done as a GUI so that background job output doesn't interfere with the next command you type. Heck, you could even have one window per job, or tabs.

> Smartphone UIs are a devastating blow to humankind.

This, right here, is EXACTLY why the general public has a big “eeeeeeeeh nah” reaction to anything Linux and actually prefer mobile UIs. Your elitist “ehrmahgehrd GUIs are for dumbstersss learn to use a terminal you newb” just shows you are completely out of touch with reality, and worse than that, you seem to wear that as some sort of badge of honour “I’m such a greybeard, a true wizard of computing”.

Get over yourself, man.

I remembered an Emacs skit :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

My phone conveniently integrates the functionality of an emergency communication device with the old calculator watch I used to have. That's about the limit of what the hardware form factor can do without it being an absolutely miserable experience. I don't do real computing on a touch screen.

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