Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
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@kevin GUIs are harder to write and that's its own problem. i was really into electron back when it was called atom-shell for this reason. we do not need to accept the externalities of electron to improve the situation
@hipsterelectron @kevin guis and clis fit two different spaces and i don't think saying "cli bad gui good", nor the opposite, is any productive tbh
they function differently, present information differently, guis are reactive, have more options to express complex information, but are very limited in non-interactive, or learnt, usage (as usage is often reactive too, clicking buttons isn't exactly great for power usage)
clis are predictable, scriptable, once you know their interface you can very easily use them with your eyes closed -- but they're often static and one dimensional, great for scripting, not as good for displaying live/changing or complex info
imo a good system has to have both good guis and good clis -- note that tui programs fall into guis mostly and don't share much with clis except by being ran in a terminal, i don't like tuis as a concept very much
they function differently, present information differently, guis are reactive, have more options to express complex information, but are very limited in non-interactive, or learnt, usage (as usage is often reactive too, clicking buttons isn't exactly great for power usage)
clis are predictable, scriptable, once you know their interface you can very easily use them with your eyes closed -- but they're often static and one dimensional, great for scripting, not as good for displaying live/changing or complex info
imo a good system has to have both good guis and good clis -- note that tui programs fall into guis mostly and don't share much with clis except by being ran in a terminal, i don't like tuis as a concept very much
@navi @kevin clis being scriptable is important too as that can (and generally should) serve the purpose of a versioned API. this allows emacs to build interfaces out of text and in the absence of electron emacs is what i have reverted to. more on text as an interface in my emacsconf 2024 talk https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/regex/
@kevin "i guess GUIs are too hard for you" can be an appropriately biting response to someone who cba and acts tuff bc they don't know how to write better user interfaces
Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
@kevin HOW DID I MISS THIS!!!
@hipsterelectron oh! This is fascinating work. I’m going to dig into this very soon, this is of direct interest for me!
@kevin also you just deleted a post presumably to edit it and before i forget i wanted to let you know the term for the phenomenon you described is "concern trolling"
@kevin HOW DID I MISS THIS!!!
Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
@kevin most command lines are incredibly poorly designed and most programmers are incentivized to make them hard to use
@hipsterelectron real eye opening moment for me was realizing that some people just enjoy the obtuseness. The Unix Hater’s Handbook is as relevant as ever and I hate that that culture effectively won in computing.
@kevin we can make it new
@hipsterelectron working on this!
@kevin i have written a compiler for a command line
