On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 04:54:54PM +0000, c-smile via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > On Monday, 25 May 2026 at 00:53:55 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > > > I prefer CLI over GUI any day > > Let me clarify this a bit: you prefer CLI in your area of expertise. > > In areas where we are "seasoned users" we prefer GUI just to minimize > efforts to perform actions. Like to make your TV louder you wouldn't > go to terminal to send IR commands to it.
I would write a 2-line bash script with a 2-letter name to do it. Just 3 keystrokes. Even better, bind it to a 2-key sequence in my window manager, ratpoison, so I don't even have to stop what I'm doing. > The thing is that we, human beings, are lazy. This goes back to the > basics of thermodynamics so is unavoidable. Being lazy does not automatically mean follow the latest trends. I reject trends. Deliberately. It doesn't mean I have to "work harder". On the contrary, I find most GUIs painfully inefficient; continually moving your hand back and forth to/from the rodent, moving the cursor to a specific location on the screen, left click, right click, more hand movements, navigating inordinately deeply nested submenus, etc.. On CLI my hands are always on the keyboard, and most commands are accessible in just a few keystrokes (auto-completion is a thing, after all; we're no longer in the 70's). With the exception of specific tasks that actually require a GUI, like tracing a complex curve or manipulating graphical data, I can accomplish most things 2x-3x faster than on any GUI. And I can express things far beyond what any GUI can express just with a few keystrokes. An equivalent GUI would require a ridiculously complex layout and ridiculously deeply-nested unnavigable submenus. See? I told you nobody will agree with me. Everyone wants their GUI and eye candy, but my screen is literally the antithesis of this: just a blank background 100% covered by a terminal with no deco, not a single button in sight, not a single window. (Well actually, the terminal *is* a window, but with no borders at all. And there are no other "windows" in sight.) This is my UI for everything I use the computer for. And yes, I'm well aware just about nobody does this (or at least nobody sane), and nobody knows how to use such a UI. And I'm perfectly fine with that. > Most of GUI users are seasoned ones. They do not want to read manuals > each year when they need to fill taxes online for example. First > application that will have just one big green button "Fill those > damned tax forms for me" will win, right? You're talking about catering to the masses, what "most people" prefer. I have zero interest in that. Different priorities. > Actually latest AI phenomenon is about our laziness too. We'd better > create a machine that will read all those manuals at dusty bookshelves > and ask us "do you want that green button pressed, yes/no?". I hate what passes for "AI" these days. I can think very well on my own, I don't need to delegate my thought process to the machine. Tasks that I *don't* want to think about, I write programs and scripts to do for me. Deterministic programs, that do exactly what they're told, no more, no less, not some probabilistic second-guesser pretending to be a human and doing things that cannot be reliably repeated and debugged. I rather read the manuals and write code to do exactly what I want, than to let somebody (or something) else do the thinking for me and I just push the big red button. If all it takes is pushing a button, it's not worth my time doing. Let somebody else do it, thank you very much. Or, these days, let some LLM do it. Whatever floats your boat. I'll be over here, with my blank screen and rodent-free UI that nobody else knows how to operate, writing my bash scripts (or these days, D scripts -- D is awesome for things like that, much cleaner language than the pile of hacks which is bash scripting). It's OK to be different, y'know? > Really, laziness is the most significant driving force of technical > progress. What you call progress, I call regression. But again -- we have different priorities. That's why I said from the beginning: I *know* that my preferences are definitely NOT what "everyone else" wants, whoever "everyone else" may be. (Insert cheesy quote here: "We are not the same". :-D) T -- Give me some fresh salted fish, please.
