[lug] GUI support, can I help you?

[Riggs, Rob]

Some of the CLI interfaces I've seen are ridiculous and should have been
stillborn. I would not use any of the adjectives below for the majority of
CLI tools I've seen. The only exception is when the given CLI tool is 'vi'.

I'm really sick of the CLI worshipping so prevalent in the Unix community.
CLI is great. I couldn't do my job half as well with out my command line
tools. Grep, sed, awk, ImageMagick, etc. are indispensable. But GUI tools
are a far more efficient for the user when systems grow to any appreciable
complexity. The amount of information that can be conveyed in a GUI is
orders of magnitude greater than that of a CLI. "A picture is worth a
thousand words." -- Really, it's true!

-Rob


-----Original Message-----
From: rotering at animalcules.com [mailto:rotering at animalcules.com]
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 11:51 AM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: Re: [lug] GUI support, can I help you?


On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 11:20:13AM -0600, Harris, James wrote:

> These [command line tools] ARE the tools that the developer provided for
> those of us who want to be old fashioned.

Command line tools are not quaint, archaic, scary, or old fashioned.
They are compact, efficient, fast, flexible, transparent, and
powerful.

If there's one thing I'm going to accomplish before I die it'll be to
convince people that Flashy GUI != (necessarily good | better than CLI
| necessarily easy).  If it takes large, pointed sticks of appreciable
diameter then so be it.
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