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.
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.
As the other comment says, use TLDR. it doesn’t tell you everything, but it does usually explain the most common uses. If you need something more advanced than you need to do more research anyway.
While it is an improvement, it’s aimed at people that already knows the commands.
For example:
- Extract a (compressed) archive file into the current directory verbosely:
tar xvf path/to/source.tar[.gz|.bz2|.xz]
What is that [.gz|.bz2|.xz] at the end? to someone that knows the tool it’s too obvious to even think about, to anyone else, it’s just there to mess with you because there’s zero reference to it and some examples include it and others don’t.
- Extract a (compressed) archive file into the current directory verbosely:
Good UX is the best, whether that’s CLI or GUI. UX is under-appreciated.
It’s also far easier to automate and use a CLI in a script - as long as it isn’t a TUI.
A well documented CLI is easy to generate a GUI from.
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.
Edit: A simple example that I’ve dealt with many times is reading and writing config data. For the CLI version it’s typically two commands:
‘tool read_cfg’ reads from the device and prints the config to stout
‘tool write_cfg’ reads a config from stdin and sends to the device.
Add a ‘-f’ option to use a file instead of stout for people that don’t remember how to use redirects. Add a couple of documentation sentences to the help command. If there are any issues, print them to stderr and bail. If the user wants to edit the config they can use whatever $EDITOR they prefer.
The same functionality in a GUI means that you have to first implement an editor for values. In my case that was generally a bunch of nested key/value pairs so I could probably find a widget that would work. And then understand how it handles being resized, gets styled, uses tooltips, etc. Of course there would need to be some code to get the data into and out of that widget which would probably need massaging. Then I need to let the user know if there are local edits. And then there is the fact that the data is now in three places, on a local disc, on the device, and in the editor and I need to communicate with the user that there is a difference between loading and saving from disc vs the device. Do I give a warning that loading from once place will overwrite anything they’ve changed in the editor? How do I make the four load/save buttons have obvious icons? And how to handle errors? An annoying pop up? Partially load the data? Something else? So many little things that have to be designed, implemented, and tested.
“I am the commander of the CLI! The CLI Commander!”
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
Can we add repeatable? CLI is repeatable and self documenting with nothing more than a text editor.
GUI? Good luck with that.
That’s totally fine. GUIs let us theme our terminal windows, tile them, jiggle them around, maybe even make them wobbly!!!
<marquee>lol</marquee>
This is the energy we need.
New comers should never ever see or require a terminal.
I can and will terminal things, but the GUI is there so why not?
I like GUIs but I also like automation. Give me a nice simple GUI but also give me a way to run from a bash shell so I can automate functions based on complex conditions and/or a schedule.
TUI
You’re just describing a task scheduler.
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
it’s just a wrapper for nix shell. so say you want to use firefox or neovim you’d just do “, firefox” and “, neovim” https://github.com/nix-community/comma
Probably this: https://github.com/nix-community/comma
Now, for music do mpd and control it ncmpcpp
Anyone can control their music streaming on their phone with an app, only the true Linux users (Arch users, btw) can control their music streaming via ssh.
I CAN interact with CLI, but i WANT to interact with good GUI. I don’t want to learn CLI commands when I don’t have to. Especially in the cases where I use it rarely
Are you kidding? There’s nothing I love more than hand typing a 400 character file path.
Yeah and that’s totally fair enough, but people who like using a command line and know the tools well rarely if ever have to type out long paths or commands. Tab completion and history suggestion (especially in a modern shell like fish or zsh) is a joy to use, and doesn’t just do file paths but command options and arguments. Man pages are very overwhelming at first, but if you’re practiced at scanning them, then it’s a lot more convenient to get the info right where you are than to navigate to another window. But the learning curve is steep and I get why someone wouldn’t want to bother.
Tab?
An original confession bear post? Out here in the Lemmy wilds? Excellent.
I still do updates and most package installs through my terminal, but anything else I look for a GUI solution. I’m lazy.
If you
- need discoverability, or
- don’t need anything composable
then sure GUIs are great.
What do you mean by conposable in this context?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability
In a CLI I can do
ls -a | grep ".png"to find all the png files in the directory. In a GUI I can use the search function if it was implemented and well designed for the purpose I need it for. But I can’t infinitely mix and match functions like I can in bash.
I do too.
If we want the year of the Linux desktop to actually happen we need to have good GUI tools for almost everything. The second you say “command line” most people’s eyes glaze over and they say they’ll stick with Windows. Believe it or not guys, most people just want something that functions out of the box and they don’t want to mess with it.
