I think people are just too rigid sometimes. Some workflows are better in GUIs, some are better in CLIs. They both have upsides and downsides depending on what you’re doing, and it’s totally fine to prefer one to the other. Just don’t let your preference keep you from learning and using other great tools!
personally I think having that all cli all the time phase is really important for a developer. Those that I’ve worked with who exclusively use gui’s just don’t have the same understanding of their system. Which is maybe fine at a certain level but not for a senior dev
I usually take the which does it faster route. Most of the time, cli wins, occasionally gui is actually faster
Good GUI are hard to make while a good cli is rather easy.
Nothing wrong with a GUI that does what it needs without fluff.
The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it’s pretty easy to tell someone you need to run “xyz -a -b -c” (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like “so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you’re looking for the 2nd tab and there’ll be a checkbox”.
The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.
It is very easy to tell someone type this and shut up. I’ve never seen an explanation of why -a -b and -c are necessary or what they do. Although I recognise that a lot of people just want magic, and running “xyz -a -b -c” is the next best thing.
I would love to see what cli commands the gui uses, they would be much easier and faster to learn.
man xyz | grep -E "^ *\-(a|b|c)"That’s one of the things I like about yt-dlp-nis on android. You can select all the options you want through the UI and grab the resulting yt-dlp cli command.
A well documented CLI is easy to generate a GUI from.
Tbh a lot of things are just easier to show/explain with images and icons in addition to text.
And in many cases mouse control is just super handy and fast
And while a terminal can show all these things… its just not comparable, IMO.
I wouldt want to write my job application in the terminal, or design a product, or whatever else requires just a smidge of graphics
So true. I mostly live in the embedded world but have had to write GUIs from time to time, mostly to connect and send commands to some sort of embedded device.
I always start with a cli version for testing and then write the GUI. A quick wrapper around the comms library and I’m done.
But there are so many annoying fiddly little details in the GUI to deal with that it usually takes as long just to write the GUI as it does the entire rest of the code. Layout, menus, tooltips, icon choices, dealing with screen sizes, DPI, resizing windows, responsive data, etc.
Someone finally said it! I admire your courage. o7
That’s totally fine. GUIs let us theme our terminal windows, tile them, jiggle them around, maybe even make them wobbly!!!
Compiz intensifies
:) Did you know KDE also does wobbly windows?
You can also do shattering or burning effects when you close them!
I’ve been using this one called TV glitch, it’s really fun
No, I’ve been GNOME peasant since Ubuntu switched to it from Unity. Now also using it on Debian. Some day when very bored, maybe in retirement I’ll try Plasma again. 😆
I use it too. I don’t think we can do wobbly, BUT “burn my windows” is awesome on gnome!
Wow I haven’t heard that name for a long time… The last time I used it, I was using the horrible AMD/ATI fglrx drivers, and Compiz had been forked into a project called Beryl. Looks like that was around 2006 or 2007.
Oh Beryl jogs a memory too! There was also Compiz Fusion.
I like a good GUI when I’m having to deal with something I’m not all that familiar with or it’s something I have to do so infrequently it’s not worth automating. CLIs become useful the moment either of the previous two statements no longer apply.
Me too. CLI is nice to have if I’m really familiar with something and just want to tell it exactly what to do. The rest of the time a GUI is best.
A well designed GUI should give you fast access to what you need and allow you to get things done easily.
Nothing wrong with that at all.
That’s legal… for now.
Thats allowed.
before I made the switch to Linux I never used a terminal. never. hell on Windows I even used a GUI for Git. I used sublime text as my IDE. if it wasn’t a GUI I was lost.
Then I switched to Linux and it forced me to actually sit down and learn the terminal and now…now I have a hard time using GUI’s. If something has a CLI or TUI option then I go for that over a GUI. like everything even my music player and video player. my IDE of choice now is DOOM Emacs. my file manager is Yazi. for Git I either use lazygit or just straight up the command line. but for everything else it’s just so much faster and in the long run easier to just use the terminal.
All that being said if you like GUI’s then hey more power to you and that’s fine. that’s the beauty of Linux. you run your system how you want to and don’t let others tell you otherwise. Hell I know a guy that uses NixOS and doesn’t have anything installed other than git and comma. he runs everything via comma. literally everything.
what is comma? difficult to find anything with a search engine lol
I do too.
I like TUI’s
GUIs are great for ad-hoc stuff, but fail when you need a precise record of what you did, e.g. to be able to repeat or automate it.
Everyone else is like: is it
git checkout -borgit branch --set-upstream-to?git checkout -band thenfuckwhen the first time I push fails.There’s a way to avoid this, I did it on my machine. I have no idea how to replicate it so this is me every time I use a different machine.
Sure, I could try to remember what the command is, or just use fuck. I choose the later every time.
