whoa jam! Fanning the dying embers of this thread a bit aren't we! 2009/9/1 jam <[email protected]>
> [snip] > > Jobst I started this with outrageous comments so I should honour the > discussion. INIT can be a shell, but is usually not. [1] > > [snip] > > So in general GUIs use the RH brain to operate. [2] That mode is intuitive > and > easy to learm, just because of the way we are built. CLI is a LH brain > activity [logical, calculating etc] Arguing one is better is foolish. > > I've never seen a GUI that is faster or less cumbersome than a CLI each in > the > hands of a suitable user. Anybody have any examples either way? > Drawing a picture in inkscape or illustrator ? Creating a budget in a spreadsheet. Editing a document or even just a text file ..... I mean everything is a command in the end. It's just easier sometimes to invoke that command using a mouse and/or keyboard than to type the underlying command in some sort of command line. Knowing the underlying command and being able to call it does give you more power because you can now use it in a program; and you can make programs do things that humans can't (practically). But some commands may be of limited value when you try to do this and are often easier to do using mouse/keyboard in a gui. I don't really need to be able to script the bezier curve command that draws a nice curvey line on a logo I'm designing, for instance. Way I see it, the unix/linux shell provides a convenient, friendly way to invoke commands and other programs on the system (interactively or not). These are programs like 'ls','find',apache or other shell scripts, which the shell forks and shell builtins like 'for' or 'while' loops. When I type 'vim' at the prompt, I've just executed a simple program that loads my text editor (unless you want to view my entire shell session as one big program/shell script). The unix shell is also a convenient/easy way to set variables in the environment which can be read by processes forked off that shell. The prevalence and ease of manipulating stdout/stdin/stderr and piping is also a distinctive unix shell thing. In a ruby cli (irb) I would instead store output from a function in a variable rather than do something with a pipe. > Girl brains and boy brains are different and despite years of rude comments > girls multi task and boys dont. Girls *seem* to prefer GUIs. Any comments ? > No :) I think most people will prefer the gui for the sorts of things that "most people" do. It's only when you need or want to create a series of instructions (a script or program) that the shell gets interesting. That being said, I'm a heavy cli user myself because I can load my current interactive shell with variables and commands for things I'm doing and move around and operate on the file system very easily; whether it's learning about couchdb or running mplayer in a particular way or administering a remote system or application etc etc.. In fact the way I'm using the shell at the moment is helping me to learn and handle lots of stuff in a way I'd have a hard time replicating in a gui without a commandline facility. -- Daniel Bush -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
