GUI is a generic swiss army knife. It's easy to introduce to someone, and it has a whole array of tools ready for use. However, each of those tools is only half-decent at its job at best, and all of the tools are unwieldy. The manual is included, but it mostly tells you how to do things that are pretty obvious.
CLI is a toolbox full of quality tools and gadgets. Most people who open the box for the first time don't even know which tools they're looking for. In addition, each tool has a set of instructions that must be followed to a T. Those who know how to use the tools can get things done super quickly, but those who don't know will inevitably cause some problems. Oh, but the high-detail manuals for all the tools are in the side compartment of the toolbox too.
Tbh the terminal is super convenient. No random UI placement. Most things follow one of several conventions so less to get used to. It’s easy to output the results of one command into another making automation obvious, no possibility for ads. It’s pretty sweet
I feel like a lot more people be comfortable using the terminal if the text displayed when it was first opened gave you a list of commands to try. There is a very steep initial learning curve immediately which discourages experimentation, and I think that with a little bit of effort you could get a lot of people over that hump and then they could enjoy terminal Bliss.
There are Windows evangelists?? 🤦🏽♀️
Just the other day, I was trying to run a CLI program, one I won't name.
I'm trying out a new immutable distro, and couldn't install it, so I said hey these new flatpaks are supposed to be all a guy could ever need.
So I downloaded an app that uses this unnamed CLI program as its core. It was a GUI app. And while it worked just fine, I also had very little control over what exactly was gonna happen and how it would happen. I wanted to do some specific things I knew the core program could do, but there was no way to do it.
Eventually I dug deeper and realized I'm an idiot and the CLI program can run without installing it or any dependencies, so it was fine to use natively. I was able to accomplish my task quickly and efficiently after that, happy as a clam.
CLI and GUI both have their place. I prefer GUI most the time, honestly. But having some CLI chops can be extremely useful at times.
I've found that one of the best things to do when making a library for something that is going to have a web interface is to first have it work in the terminal. You can much more quickly play around with the design and fix issues there instead of having to work with a more complex web interface.
You just create a simple menu system, like
input("1: Feature A\n2: Feature B\n>")and just start trying out all of the different scenarios and workflows.meanwhile Windows users: let me drop into this random strangers discord who claims he will make my PC faster by dropping this .bat file that will run thousands of commands to "debloat" my install. also let me edit the registry and add random values to keys that I don't know what they're used for. this process is basically irreversible because I will inevitably forget which keys I've edited over time, wow windows is so simple and easy and intuitive 🤡
Are the "Windows evangelists" in the room with us right now? Every Windows admin I know hates Microsoft with a burning rage. Literally the only people I've ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.
Counterintuitively, that's one reason I like dealing with Windows: the community knows what it is and doesn't pretend otherwise, like some other more "zealous" fan bases.
It's all a matter of preference anyway (assuming you have both options anyway). CLI is less intuitive and takes longer to learn, but can be wicked fast if you know what you're doing. GUI is more intuitive and faster to pick up, but digging through the interface is usually slower than what a power user can accomplish in the CLI.
It depends on what your use case is and how you prefer your work flow. The only dumb move is judging how other people like their setup.
I do most of my work at the command line, my co-workers do think I'm nuts for doing it, but one of our recent projects required us all to log into a client's systems, and a significant portion of the tasks must be done via bash prompt. Suddenly, I'm no longer the team weirdo, I'm a subject matter expert.
On CLI I figure out the command I need once.
Put it in a script.
Cron it if I want it to be daemonized.
Never think about it ever again.
Anti-CLI folks just have a bad workflow.
They see the script as the end, when in reality it's a foundation. I rarely look at my foundation. I build on it.
With this workflow I have dozens, hundreds, or thousand of automatic actions that "just work". Idk, works for me.
That said, if you prefer to click yourself to RSI to accomplish the same task, who am I to judge. I just watch and nod until I'm asked for a suggestion.
I used to be on the yelling guys side and boy was I wrong. I now write scripts to do anything repetitive, all the time and it's great. I have a whole library of them I use and add to and improve all the time.
Yeah, I was wrong.
Did a process last week that took me 13 steps in the command line that took about an hour. If I'd have done it manually it would have taken days. After I worked out how to do it I trimed it down to 6 steps and sent it to my coworker that also needs that information. His eyes glazed over on step two of explaining it to him and he's just going to keep doing it his way....
There is nothing productive about searching online for some stupid command that is outdated for 2 years, breaks some shit and then you need another 2 hours to unfuck it because it's not obvious from the long noodle of a command how to revert it. For something that could just be 3 clicks through control panel that every idiot could navigate without having to use online search engine.
Even if it was less productive, I would insist on it, because it's just more fun.
I've never met any windows evangelists to be honest. Lots of Apple evangelists though who will spend forever talking about windows. Every developer I've met who uses Windows always had a tongue in cheek sort of "well it kind of sucks in some ways but it's what I'm used to, one day maybe I'll get off my ass and change OS".
Reminds me of the "I use Arch Linux btw" meme which doesn't really happen as much anymore other than as a joke. Also, I use Arch Linux btw
Think this is more of a accessibility thing. No one denies the CLI is really efficient to use if you're a professional, it shouldn't be the norm that you have to be proficient with it to use your computer to the fullest though. Nor to receive help if you don't feel comfortable using it.
It would be nice if everyone could enjoy free and trustworthy computing, including people who either can't or won't learn many dozens text commands and paradigms.
CLIs are almost always magnitudes more expressive than their feeble, derivative GUIs.
People just don’t want to confess that they are feared from that little black box that apparently kills your whole machine, if you just type a wrong letter having a terminal open. 🤗
As always,
not enough education in society.If more people would be brave to test it, more people would see that they can interact like this, better. And some, like me, appreciate the hard work GUI designers do, to make stuff more intuitive in the cost of efficiency
I love GUI with integrated terminal, tho, like dolphin
I worked customer support for a WordPress hosting company for a while, and about 70% of all of their troubleshooting was done in terminal. I never used terminal until that job. To this day I do most of my management the same way
"i shouldn't have to memorise commands just to do basic tasks"
me:
Isn't this what ctrl+r is for? 😅
Windows kept making things easier so people could let their brains rot away.
Works other way around too
Due to work environment and me not switching yet (I won't go to W11,but switching requires a bunch of time investment I haven't gotten around to yet) I'm mostly working in Windows, but even them I use CLI a ton. Mostly powershell, but there are a lot of cmd commands useful in troubleshooting, and robocopy and other tools are more reliable than their gui counterparts.
Yes it is bad ux/ui but its better than windows regedit or its 20 control panels that don't do the thing you want, or windows terminal that you use constantly and don't notice.
T. I did not understand how anyone would like terminal for software and now i swear by my drop down console. But i agree, the few areas of terminal people mostly use should be covered by a gui, eg gnome having "open terminal in folder location" and gnome having ability to add repos to software center like kde.
I use both Windows and Linux. I also mess around with github programs here and there and they almost all require use of a command line to install or manipulate. And because a command line intrinsically is going to inform you way too little or way too much about what you are doing I end up having way more technical issues because I don't realize I'm missing a dependency or I glazed over an error that popped up in a sea of text during installation.
Linux's leaning on CLI is good for extremes: ultra-techy programmers and perfectionists and the exact opposite: people who just want internet and a word processor (who will install like basically nothing anyway so CLI wont bother them and probably keep them from breaking something in a GUI settings page).
People in the middle who are semi-techy end up annoyed because if they want to do some middle of the road changes to their system they have to use a command line or even code something themselves. Instead of just using a search engine to find the 1 out of a billion different little windows based applications that already exist to do the small yet very specific thing to a "good enough" level. Which just requires a minute or two of internet research, clicking download, waiting a bit, then installing a thing. Some of those tasks you can do while doing something else.
Or yes, maybe they end up needing to edit an ini file or a registry file (very rarely in the latter case).
Basically I'm talking about tech users that always use the path of least resistance rather than the most advanced or custom. People who want to do 20% of the work to get 80% of the results.
My favorite example of the use of both are PDFs:
- I'll use Stirling-PDF to insert/replace pages in specific places, rotate, move pages, etc. I like to visually understand what I'm doing.
- I'll use
pdfuniteto merge PDFs.
