Give me a CLI over a GUI any day.
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@lauren Hybrid UIs that combined the best of CLI and GUI existed 50+ years ago (TENEX) but everyone still follows the Mac GUI that had to fit into 128K of RAM, with more restrictions due to using ROM or the Unix shell that prioritizes terseness over usability (bash has some semi-useless workarounds)
@PeterLudemann And an @ prompt to you, too!
@lauren I never used TENEX but worked with someone who had ... I was assign the task of designing a dial-up tty app for 2-dimensional layout of real estate newspaper ads ... I used the TENEX design principles and deployed the app with 1-page of documentation, most of which was taken up with how to set the DIP switches on the tty, dial in, login in and type "?" - and gave the phone number for our help desk. We deployed to several hundred offices (the app was used by the receptionists) and didn't receive a single help desk call.
@PeterLudemann TENEX was at one time the most used PDP-10 OS on ARPANET/Internet. TOPS-10 was rarer, though notably used at SAIL (SU-AI) Stanford AI Lab (where my login ID was [1,UCL] I believe). MIT of course was mostly ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System).
@lauren Amen! Preach on, my Brother!
I can't stand a WIMP interface. Everything takes so long, and requires micro-precision in pointing. Even then, you have to resort to arrow keys when it thinks you pointed to the left, but you pointed to the right.
Even the CLI on Windows is better/faster/cheaper. But do I really have to type "powershell 'certutil -validate -enterprise NTAuth | tee cert.txt'" just to have the 'tee' command? Still, there's no way to do this task with the GUI anyway.
@lauren Even a TUI is better than a GUI
@lauren I had a long chat with gemini yesterday. And it hit me, the thing about GUIs, is they really messed us up.
This is how things needed to work,
ctl-> cursor movement,
esc: program commands, which was mapped to ALT
finally the OS key windows or whatever, which mapped to ctl->alt
The layers above that would grab keys randomly, and arbitrarily. I'd forgive most of the GUI sins if they didn't destroy my muscle memory.
