this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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There are definitely people who think it is reasonable to memorize button locations and 10 levels of menus in GUI programs but would rather go into cardiac arrest than use something like
program --option input-file output-file.thing with gui is you don't need to memorize button locations and menus. If you do it's poor layout. Good gui lets you find things you didn't know you were looking for intuitively, without external resources or manual. CLI requires you to know what exactly you are doing and is impossible to use without external resources. Nothing against terminal but unless you know what you are doing and every command required to complete that action, it's ass. If gui was so bad and cli was so good, guis would not be used by anyone.
I mean you dont go around copy pasting device ids and running commands for 20 minutes to connect your device through terminal when it is done with 2 clicks in the gui even by someone who has never used a pc before.
While you don't need to memorize button locations and menus, the frustration is that it takes longer, and memorizing those details slightly mitigates. It's torture helping someone do something while they hunt for the UI element they need to get to the next level of hierarchy. They will do it, in time, but it just feels like an eternity.
The main issue in GUI versus CLI is that GUI narrows the available options at a time. This is great, for special purpose usage. But if you have complex stuff to do, a CLI can provide more instant access to a huge chunk of capabilities, and provide a framework for connecting capabilities together as well as a starting point for making repeatable content, or for communicating in a forum how to fix something. Just run command "X" instead of a series of screenshots navigating to the bowels of a GUI to do some obscure thing.
Of course UI people have generally recognized the power and usefulness of text based input to drive actions and any vaguely powerful GUI has to have some "CLI-ness" to it.
Sure terminal can be better in a few cases but the fact you are typing this from a guy browser on a gui os speaks for itself.
Of course my terminals outnumber my browser tabs by about 3:1 right now. Commenting on an internet site needs neither scale nor complexity and a WebUI is fine for that.
The alternative to memorization is the analog to "hunt and peck typing" where you just search the whole fucking screen/program.
thing with terminal is you don't need to memorize commands, syntax and options. If you do it's poor design. Good code lets you find things you didn't know you were looking for intuitively, without external resources or manual. Gui requires you to know what exactly you are doing and is impossible to use without external resources. Nothing against gui but unless you know what you are doing and every click required to complete that action, it's ass. If term was so bad and gui was so good, terminals would not be used by anyone.
I mean you dont go around copy pasting device ids and running buttons for 20 minutes to connect your device through gui when it is done with 2 commands in the term even by someone who has never used a pc before.
Ftfy buddy
Okay then how do I mount my drive through terminal and set it to automount every time and change it's name to appear as "disk 3" everywhere?
man genfstab
genfstab whateveroptionsyouwant
Now give me all the X and Y coordinates of where i would click on my QHD screen for your example in gui plz
Your guide did literally nothing other than return errors. Seems like even you don't know how to do this. And you follow wrong instructions that don't work up with asking for coordinates of buttons for gui, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. As in you've gone through the barrel, through the bottom, dug through the entire earth and are scraping the bottom of another barrel from under it.
I like the terminal on linux a lot, but with arguments like these you need to touch grass at least once a year my friend.
man genfstab gave an error? Neither CLI nor GUI is gonna help with simply not having something installed that the guide assumed.
Why would i install random software some rando on some random site tells me to to do a function my preinstalled gui(and terminal) can out of the box?
Yeah, you wouldn't. My point is that's because it's preinstalled, not because of any GUI/CLI advantage.
Yawn, sure sure.
Thats a lot of text without a single x y coordinate buddy. Try harder while touching that grass, won't ya?
Got it not even you can think of anything to defend clis inferiority.
As far as I'm concerned "windows key, start typing the name of the application" or "CMD+space, start typing the name of the application" is the right way to handle GUI. Apple nailed it with Spotlight and it's vastly improved Windows and a variety of Linux DE's
Uh.. Do you think spotlight was first doing search by typing from a hotkey..?
What you're describing are basic menus and icon search. I honestly don't get what you're getting at with this at all, maybe I'm just dumb.
I suppose the point is that the way people interact with GUIs actually resembles how they interact with CLIs. They type from memory instead of hunting through a nested hierarchy to get where they were going. There was a time when Desktop UIs considered text input to be almost a sin against ease of use, an overcorrection for trying to be "better" than CLI. So you were made to try to remember which category was deignated to hold an application that you were looking for, or else click through a search dialog that only found filenames, and did so slowly.
Now a lot of GUIs incorporate more textual considerations. The 'enter text to launch' is one example, and a lot of advanced applications now have a "What do you want to do?" text prompt. The only UI for LLMs is CLI, really. One difference is GUI text entry tends to be a bit "fuzzier" compared to a traditional CLI interface which is pretty specific and unforgiving.
It wasn't the first, no. But it was the first that was commonplace and implemented well enough that others almost immediately adopted it.
It's the same as the iPad. Tablets existed before the ipad. Nobody bought them until apple created a market for them. It's their biggest strength as a company.