this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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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.
I would assert that basically every shell I'm aware of is also a programming/scripting langauge, able to handle things like loops and branches. This is possible to do in a GUI but it's kind of telling no one has achieved this in a desktop environment to any significant degree, including in the Linux space.
"Iterate over all of the files in this folder, if it's a video file of any format, create a folder with the same name as the video file in ~/Videos and move the file there." I'm unaware of an OS desktop environment that can do even that level of automation with default GUI tools. It's like 5 lines of Bash including "done;" at the end. You can probably do it in PowerShell, but I bet Windows power users would rather use AutoHotKey for this.
You really can't imagine doing that with a GUI? Here you have something to give you an idea (sorry it's in Spanish, but I guess you can get an idea of how it may work):
Here I'm selecting a specific type of files (PDFs, but I can select several different types, as I'm organising by file type), after which I did a right click, and selected a contextual action that shows a popup to do a following action. In this case it's renaming, but it could easily be a "Move to..." that could include a check option of "Create a folder for each file". I mean, it was actually pretty fast too. It's not that difficult.
It wouldn't make sense to add clutter to a GUI that benefits a tiny fraction of users a tiny fraction of the time while making the experience worse for everyone else.
I can imagine making a GUI that does it. But most aren't able to. "That could include a check option of..." yeah it doesn't though, is my point. GUIs are for doing things manually.