A gui is helpful sometimes, but there’s a lot of cases where there’s no feasible way to make a good gui that does what the terminal can do.
Right tools for the right job.
For example, a gui to move a file from one folder to another is nice - drag and drop.
A gui that finds all files in a directory with a max depth of 2 but excludes logs and runs grep and on matching files extracts the second field of every line in the file? Please just let me write a one liner in bash
Me fucking with hard drives/partitions : GUI please
Me doing pretty much anything else - Terminal
I see a lot of people saying they have to use a GUI tool for partition management, and I’ve never understood why.
Text based tools like parted are fairly easy to use, at least compared to other terminal tools the same people are able to use for other tasks.
What is it about partitioning that needs a GUI when other tasks don’t? Is it the visual representation of the partition layout? A general fear of borking a disk?
Disagree. Anything that can be done with terminal can be done with a GUI, you just need to be good at UX. Most programmers I know are pretty bad at UX, and program for themselves, not the user.
Edit, just to clarify (because I know some of you will feel personally attacked): I’m not saying a GUI may be better, or more efficient than a CLI, I’m just saying that it can be done. And as an example, see 3D shaders in modern programs, that need no code at all and are purely visual. That was unthinkable some years ago.
That’s just not true. Not without lots of hand waving.
In my terminal I can, and pretty much hourly do, combine many programs in chains of input and output to perform specific tasks and get information I need. And that’s how these programs are designed to be used. The programmer builds it to do specific things and then the user can combine the program with others in novel and nearly endless ways.
With a GUI, sometimes that’s possible between two programs if you can copy/paste between them but it’s much less reusable and a lot more tedious. But usually it’s just not possible because they’re designed for specific user personas and not as general purpose tools that may be part of a script.
Well, seeing the progression of 3D programs and how a lot of complex operations are nowadays done in a visual way, I guess we won’t agree on this one, I guess.
But I affirm in my conviction that anything can be made with a GUI. It may be difficult to reach a suitable GUI, with a lot of back and forth, and probably a lot of user feedback, but with a good methodology and a good understanding of UX, it can be done.
Sad we can’t agree. Cheers.
Most programmers are bad at UX but not nearly as bad as GUI designers are at understanding abstraction.
That’s your opinion, and I disagree with it. It takes a lot of abstract thinking to synthesize an action in a visual way, like an icon.
Designers are good at lateral thinking, and founding visual ways of representing abstract concepts (and you can’t represent something visually if you don’t understand it first).
How would you implement piping in GUI?
Could you show us an example program with a GUI you created for this?
Are you talking about sending the output of one process to the input of another?
I think the shaders I’ve mentioned are a great example of that: you do something in a block, then send the result to the input of another block.
Sorry if it’s not what you mean, but my point is that, with some effort, you can create a visual representation of even the most abstract concepts. Physicists do this constantly. If we can make a visual representations of 4D, for example, what prevents us from doing the same for programming logic? Or for commands?
To play the opposite team a bit here, I like the idea Android uses of Intents for something like this. I think it falls apart a bit in reality because app companies kinda want you in their garden and so don’t often do the work to keep things interoperable. That and the use cases from users on phones don’t frequently involve cross app functionality. But the ability is powerful for apps to say “my app needs a user photo” or one of my faves “my app needs a pgp provider (for the password store app)” and then let the other app do that piece of functionality as determined by the OS, which tracks a lot of those providers and lets the user decide which to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS), or in general, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
'Course, there’s a reason those things basically never catch on, which is that they don’t actually reduce the inherent difficulty of figuring out the algorithm, and for anything non-trivial messing with a whole bunch of drop-down lists and shit is more cumbersome than just typing the damn thing.
They tried to replace programming languages with drag-and-drop toolkits too. It can be done, but sometimes there’s a reason we don’t do it.
But I’m not talking about programming languages, I’m talking about CLI programs, or system commands.
And I’m not telling a GUI would be better, or more efficient, I’m just saying that it can be done (something you are saying too about programming languages).
That’s the point: a GUI can replace a CLI. Is it better? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Is it possible? Absolutely.
You can have your GUI do anything a terminal can I guess, but you’d need a few million buttons on that gui where the programmer has anticipated each and every combination of CLI command that you are going to use, encoded that to a button or menu, included text entry boxes for each variable and have bundled every program, application and dependency that has ever existed. Totally possible.
Surely you’ve used something roughly equivalent like searching a text, be it web page or other document, for a word or filtering a spreadsheet?
How would one use grep for a webpage in a browser? Does the page need to be accessed outside the browser?
