Comment by bregma
4 hours ago
Listen, as long as control-alt-T opens a CLI window that I can fullscreen you can do whatever you want with that self-Gratification User Interface crap.
The only change to the CLI since I first learned it over 40 years ago is that it's gotten bigger and clearer and most desktops allow me to have multiple CLIs I can switch between.
A graphical user experience is all about how to limit what I can do in an effort to make it easier to learn. Imagine a hammer designed for ease of use by a beginning carpenter: remove the dangerous claw and nasty thumb-crushing head and replace the handle in case you hold it wrong and you end up with a nice oven mitt. The chattering classes on social media can coo over its colours and textures. Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not) and switch on their nail gun.
So go ahead and build your bike shed with a box a nails and a pair of taupe quilted cotton hammers with a pattern of garden vegetables stamped on the back.
> Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not)
1. Carpenters are often women who like wearing skirts at work 2. Many carpenters are Scottish and prefer to dress traditionally 3. Carpentry is incredibly progressive career where many men wear skirts to work 4. Carpenters regardless of gender like to work nude
No, wait, I get it now 5. Carpenters let their trousers hang, resulting in the cleavage of their buttocks showing when they reach over.
Damn, I was getting exited over male carpenters wearing skirts to work.
I believe most objections to GUIs come from people who've never experienced good mouse control. If you're not using a high-end gaming mouse and a high refresh rate monitor, with sensitivity/acceleration curve selected with careful thought, on a mouse pad that suits your settings, you probably have bad mouse control.
Watch some videos of top-ranking aim trainer players so see how high the human skill ceiling is for mouse control, and look at the hardware they're using.
I suspect that is a huge factor, indeed. I often see people using bad mice, with uncomfortable shape, bad buttons, bad sensitivity plus often acceleration enabled. Then on top of that, people are putting mouse in some weird locations, like a narrow slit shelf, or far away from the keyboard (because they have a bad sensitivity configured in part). Or even no mouse and just use trackpad (even the superb one like in Macbooks). Of course GUI would feel clunky that way.
This is why people find nerds irritating. No one is forcing you to use anything you don’t want to. I use the CLI too, and I’m an Emacs fan, just about the opposite of trendy-flashy. But those of us who also like GUIs for the things they’re good at are interested in making them better.
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?
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.
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.
If graphical interfaces are so useless to you, what are you doing in a thread about graphical interfaces?
People use computers for other stuff than coding. And for most of those workflows a command line doesn't serve.