5d ago

Almost as annoying as the windows evangelists

406 comments

GUI is a generic swiss army knife. It's easy to introduce to someone, and it has a whole array of tools ready for use. However, each of those tools is only half-decent at its job at best, and all of the tools are unwieldy. The manual is included, but it mostly tells you how to do things that are pretty obvious.
CLI is a toolbox full of quality tools and gadgets. Most people who open the box for the first time don't even know which tools they're looking for. In addition, each tool has a set of instructions that must be followed to a T. Those who know how to use the tools can get things done super quickly, but those who don't know will inevitably cause some problems. Oh, but the high-detail manuals for all the tools are in the side compartment of the toolbox too.

People can do whatever they like, and heck I find CLI intimidating sometimes, but I'm always learning something new a little bit at a time.
I'm tired of seeing it in every field of interest that has any kind of payoff, whether art or FOSS.
"I'm [(almost always) a guy] who (maybe has kids and) has a job. I stopped learning anything after I got my job-paper / degree / highschool diploma. I shouldn't have to learn anything anymore. I am happy to shell out disposable sad-salary-man money (and maybe my soul idk) to any mega-corp that offers me a "create desired outcome button" without me having to think too much. It's [current year]! I shouldn't have to think anymore! Therefore Linux is super behind and only for nerds and I desire its benefits so much that I leave this complaint anywhere these folks gather so they know what I deserve."
Agh. I gotta go before this rant gets too long lol

" i shouldn't have to memorize commands"
the up arrow:
- The commands: ls cp mv...
  Meanwhile you get Windows people who memorize things like Get-AllUsersHereNowExtraLongJohn
  
  Get-ListOfFunnyPowershellReferences++
  (Seriously...ExtraLongJohn is damn funny)
  
  Get-command -noun <string[]>
  Handy AF
  
  In PowerShell most common cmdlets for basic operations have aliases by default. And funnily enough you can use both Windows (cmd.exe) and Unix shell names for these. (copy vs cp, del vs rm, etc.)
  AFAIK The cmdlets that you use only by Verb-Noun convention are mostly used in scripts, or in some administration tasks.
  I also think that some poeple miss the point of PowerShell, as it's not supposed to be worked with like with Unix shells, since it's more object-oriented than string-oriented.
  
  Long long maaaaan
- Just wait until they learn about ctrl-R haha
  
  I've seen people not realize tab autocompletes.
  
  Holy shit
  
  holy hell
- I'm the type to spend 10 minutes going through my previous commands, rather than 5 seconds typing it.
  
  I've got h aliased to history | grep and it's been revolutionary
  Alternatively, ctrl+r
  
  What about ctrl+r to reverse search?
- Up arrow about 400 times for that one command*
- See also: atuin - a shell history tool that records your shell history to sqlite.
  Seamless sync across shell sessions & machines, E2EE + trivially self-hostable sync server, compatible with all major shells, interactive search, etc.
  
  GNU Terry Pratchett
  
  Well, now I know they use gruvbox for the demo/screenshots, I guess I have to see if it can be a replacement for Mcfly.
- "Alias? What is that?"

Terminal is fun. I like being hackerman

Nothing wrong with CLI. It is fast and responsive.
Unless you want mainstream use. Because the majority of people can't even use a UI effectively. And CLI is much worse.
- Its also repeatable. Usually the same commands and ways work on the majority of systems. If you want to do that with a GUI you have to refresh a tutorial etc. Every time they change the UI. With CLI commands this usually isn't the case.
- This is the core of the argument. You can't expected the average casual user to use CLI at all if you want mainstream adoption. The vast majority of people can barely operate Windows as-is, telling them to use a Linux CLI would be asinine.
  
  There was a time before Windows where a lot of people used MS-DOS and it was all terminal. Maybe computers where less popular back in those days because of the learning curve, but still many people used a PC with just the terminal.
- Yup. I made a scientific analysis program. Using CLI and your own editors you can do so much. And instead of focusing on making the algorithms, I had to focus on making a GUI for months because people need things to click.
  And then even with very responsive and easy GUI, with like just 5 types of "views" and probably like <5 buttons/inputs each, people are like "it seems complicated" within like 1 minutes of demo. They haven't even tried to use it or tried to learn anything. I even modeled the views to be as similar to another software they use.
  I feel like people just don't like computers.
  
  I'm a programmer and I definetly don't like computers.
- Exactly. Most things need to optimize for the lowest common denominator of understanding, and buttons with words and fields that have explicit purposes and positioning are a much easier starting point than "use command -help and figure out the syntax yourself," even if someone who learns the syntax could then possibly be more efficient at using it.

I use Linux and I prefer GUIs. I'm the kind of person that would rather open a filemanager as superuser and drag and drop system files than type commands and addresses. I hope you hax0rs won't forget that we mere mortals exist too and you'll make GUIs for us 🙏🙏🙏
- Tbf, the file explorer is actually one really good argument for GUIs over terminals. Same with editing text. Its either simple enough to use Nano or I need a proper text editor. I don't mess around with vim or anything like that that.
  Its all tools. Some things are easier in a file manager, some things are easier in a GUI.
  
  You've angered the Emacs gods 😨
  
  I think it depends, if I have a simple file structure and know where stuff is, it's pretty efficient to do operations in the terminal.
  If I have a billion files to go through a file manager might be easier.
  
  Nano, the best text editor
  
  Yeah I prefer fancy text editor too. And my biggest heartbreak was learning that I can't just sudo kate (there's a way to use Kate to edit with higher privileges but I never remember how, edit: apparently it's opensuse specific problem).
  Born to Kate, forced to nano
- I use both, depends a bit on the task at hand. Generally simple tasks GUI and complex ones CLI. Especially if I want anything automated.
- It depends. But yeah I’d rather use something like Handbrake than raw dog FFmpeg.
- I tried to learn superfile thinking it could make terminal more exciting but nah.
  Gimme that comfy file explorer gui.
  Totally agree.
- FWIW I do use the file browser too when I'm looking for a file with a useful preview, e.g. images.
  When I do have to handle a large amount of files though (e.g. more than a dozen) and so something "to them", rather than just move them around, then the CLI becomes very powerful.
  It's not because one uses the CLI that one never used a file browser.
  
  Yeah, when I need to inspect lots of images I just open the folder in gwenview.
  For peeking at a single picture or two through you can hold down control and click/hover on the filename when using Konsole. Love that feature. You can even listen to .wav files this way.
  
  I once did rm \* accidentally lol. I now have a program that just moves files to trash aliased as "rm" just in case. I just don't feel confident moving files in CLI
- I would say "why not, to each their own" if not the thought about what else the filemanager is going to do with root access (like downloading data from web for file preview). But the general sentiment still stands, it is absurd to think that computer must be used only in one way by all people

I do most of my work at the command line, my co-workers do think I'm nuts for doing it, but one of our recent projects required us all to log into a client's systems, and a significant portion of the tasks must be done via bash prompt. Suddenly, I'm no longer the team weirdo, I'm a subject matter expert.
- Wait until they find out about Ansible.

Having started out in programming before the GUI era, typing commands just feels good to me. But tbh Linux commands really are ridiculously cryptic - and needlessly so. In the 1980s and 90s there was a great OS called VMS whose commands and options were all English words (I don't know if it was localized). It was amazingly intuitive. For example, to print 3 copies of a file in landscape orientation the command would be PRINT /COPIES=3 /ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE. And you could abbreviate anything any way you wanted as long as it was still unambiguous. So PRI /COP=3 /OR=LAND would work, and if you really hated typing you could probably get away with PR /C=3 /O=L. And it wasn't even case-sensitive, I'm just using uppercase for illustration.
The point is, there's no reason to make everybody remember some programmer's individual decision about how to abbreviate something - "chmod o+rwx" could have been "setmode /other=read,write,execute" or something equally easy for newbies. The original developers of Unix and its descendants just thought the way they thought. Terseness was partly just computer culture of that era. Since computers were small with tight resources, filenames on many systems were limited to 8 characters with 3-char extension. This was still true even for DOS. Variables in older languages were often single characters or a letter + digit. As late as 1991 I remember having to debug an ancient accounting program whose variables were all like A1, A2, B5... with no comments. It was a freaking nightmare.
Anyway, I'm just saying the crypticness is largely cultural and unnecessary. If there is some kind of CLI "skin" that lets you interact with Linux at the command line using normal words, I'd love to know about it.
- Anyway, I’m just saying the crypticness is largely cultural and unnecessary. If there is some kind of CLI “skin” that lets you interact with Linux at the command line using normal words, I’d love to know about it.
  This is far more manual than you probably had in mind, but Linux has support for a command called alias, which allows you to basically rename anything you like:
  https://phoenixnap.com/kb/linux-alias-command
  
  Alias lets you rename commands but not options. For example you could alias "grep" as "search", but you couldn't alias the "-h" option as "-nonames" and type "search -nonames" . You still have to type "search -h".
- typing commands just feels good to me
  That's because for the most part, it's faster. You don't have to lift one hand off the keyboard. Also using the cursor and clicking on something requires more precision and effort to get right compared to typing a word or 2 and hitting enter.
  This is me kinda bragging, but at my typing speeds, something like ls -la is under half a second. Typing cd proj (tab to auto complete) (first few letters of project name if it's fairly unique) (tab to auto complete), hitting enter, and then typing a quick docker compose up is an order of magnitude faster than starting the containers in docker GUI.
  But tbh Linux commands really are ridiculously cryptic - and needlessly so.
  Agreed. Okay, to be fair, for parameters, most of the time you have the double-dash options which spell out what they do, and for advanced users there's the shorthands so everyone should be happy. But the program/command names themselves. Ugh. Why can't we standardize aliases for copy, move, remove/delete? Keep the old binaries names, but make it so that guides for new users could use actual English aliases so people would learn quicker?
  
  At least part of this is the decentralized/complied nature of a FOSS operating system. You don't get a command called grep because someone making design decisions about a complete system holistically decides that tool should be called grep. You get it because some random programmer in the world needed a way to find patterns in text so they wrote one and that guy called it grep and someone else saw utility in packaging that tool with an OS. It's a patchwork, and things like this are a culture of sorts.
  
  The standard VMS text editor (EDT) assigned editing functions to the number keypad. Using it became so natural to me I eventually didn't think about pressing keys, it was like using a car gearshift. I've never gotten to that point with any GUI editor, even with heavy use of keyboard shortcuts.
- It's definitely more intuitive but It would drive me insane having to type that all out.
  
  Like I said, you could abbreviate any way you liked as long as it was unambiguous. I think the ease of remembering meaningful words overrides the bit of extra typing It drives me more insane - and takes more time - looking up one-letter options that have no relation to what they do.
- alias your way to something you like
- And you could abbreviate anything any way you wanted as long as it was still unambiguous.
  Oh that reminds me of diskpart on Windows. I always liked the fact that I could abbreviate "assign" to "ass".
  
  Sadly, Windows and "ass" are increasingly easy to associate.

Tbh the terminal is super convenient. No random UI placement. Most things follow one of several conventions so less to get used to. It’s easy to output the results of one command into another making automation obvious, no possibility for ads. It’s pretty sweet

Are there people who are mad at other people for using the terminal? Is this really a thing that exists?
- Usually it’s the other way around
- Not really. But you know, gotta find ways to feel smarter than other people so here we go.
  
  And those Windows evangelists! Don't we all know 'em with their strong opinions about operating systems? shakes fist at cloud
- 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.
  
  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
- It's not that they are mad others use CLI, it's that they're mad that Linux devs regularly stop creating P&CI features, instead opting for CLI with no P&CI equivalent action.
  It's kind of obvious why - CLI is already very flexible right out of the box, and it takes much less work to add functionality within CLI rather than creating it for the P&CI.
  At the same time, I understand the P&CI folk's frustration, since one of biggest obstacles to getting more people on Linux is the lack of P&CI solutions, and the fact that many actions on Linux are explained solely via CLI.
  CLI folks have invested the time to use terminals effectively and view overuse of the P&CI as beneath them, and P&CI folks have no interest in dumping time into learning CLI to do something they could do on Windows with P&CI.
  
  Pardon my ignorance but what does P&CI stand for?
  Edit: nvm got it I think it's Point & Click Interface
  
  Linux is the terminal.
  The GUI applications are just terminal applications where you press buttons instead of typing. Creating the buttons and UI is extra overhead for developers.
  CLI folks have invested the time to use terminals effectively and view overuse of the P&CI as beneath them, and P&CI folks have no interest in dumping time into learning CLI to do something they could do on Windows with P&CI.
  There are people who have learned to use Linux, using whatever tools are best for the job and people who have decided that the only way to interact with a computer is with a mouse and refuse to learn anything else.
  You don't have to swap away from Windows. But, if you choose to, know that you will have to learn a new operating system and, on Linux, this means becoming familiar with the terminal.
  If you're going to artificially limit yourself, despite the chorus of Linux users telling you otherwise, by deciding that any terminal use indicates a failure of the OS or of developers, then you should not use Linux.
  It's hard enough to learn a new OS. Artificially restricting yourself to only using your mouse is going to severely limit your ability to function.
  
  they're mad that Linux devs regularly stop creating P&CI features, instead opting for CLI with no P&CI equivalent action.
  I've never seen this?
  It's typically a completely different developer who creates the CLI first, and then one of us adds a P&C after.
  So if something is brand new, sure there might be no P&C, yet.
  I promise There's no conspiracy to not have nice things. Haha.
- In a pretty high end high tech company, there's still lots of people who see a terminal and think "ha hah, they are still stuck in old mainframe stuff like you used to see in the movies".
  My team determined long ago that we have to have two user experiences for our team to be taken seriously.
  A GUI to mostly convince our own managers that it's serious stuff. Also to convince clients who have execs make the purchasing decisions without consulting the people that will actually use it.
  An API, mostly to appease people who say they want API, occasionally used.
  A CLI to wrap that API, which is what 99% of the customers use 95% of the time (this target demographic is niche.
  Admittedly, there's a couple of GUI elements we created that are handy compared to what we can do from CLI, from visualizations to a quicker UI to iterate on some domain specific data. But most of the "get stuff done" is just so much more straightforward to do in CLI.
- I don’t think so, but I do criticize not having an option, that is why I stopped using Cisco personally and professionally, some things are fast using the cli, some things just need an Ui, you need both.
  
  A cli is a ui. I know that's pedantic but this is Linux memes
  
  Like I get and appreciate the CLI and for networking, that's pretty much all I'm using anyway, but I am shocked that enterprise networking doesn't even bother to do any GUI. Once upon a time Mellanox Onyx bothered to do a GUI and I could see some people light up, finally an enterprise switch that would let them do some stuff from a GUI. Then nVidia bought them and Cumulus and ditched their GUI.
  There's this kind of weird "turn in your geek card" culture about rejecting GUIs, but there's a good amount of the market that want at least the option, even if they frankly are a bit ashamed to admit it. You definitely have to move beyond GUI if you want your tasks to scale, but not every engagement witih the technology needs to scale.
- I have a coworker that likes to pick fun at my usage of CLI tools. He said it's confusing "why would I use a terminal when the GUI was made after?". They vehemently hate anytime they have to work with CLI.
  I watched them use an FTP program to download and change one value in a .conf file. Like they downloaded the file, opened it in notepad++, changed one thing, saved it, reuploaded / overretten the original. I tried to show them how to just use nano and got told their way was "better since you could ensure the file was replaced". Its okay, I've secretly caught them using it a couple times lol
  
  Fortunately, Linux terminals are gorgeous and easy to use. I never wanted to use Windows' com because it was so ugly and user-hostile. I know Powershell is a thing now, but it still looks ugly to me.
- I posted a meme a while back and out of the woodwork comes some guy ranting about how apt install sshfs is confusing. Like, the meme wasn't even about CLI vs GUI lol. Nobody was claiming superiority, but there they go ranting anyway.
  
  To me apt is confusing but that's because I've become so used to pacman. The only package manager that comes close to pacman for me is xbps.
  
  I think you linked the wrong post
- Yes, that's a real thing. They use it as an excuse to dog on linux distros & say "Muh linux not great yet"
  
  Maybe I misinterpreted the meme, I thought the yelling guy is also a Linux user.
- Speaking from experience.... Yes. Absolutely yes.
- Yes https://lemm.ee/post/59138795/19097469

i dont use the terminal to be productive, i use it to feel like a hacker
- Setting the colorscheme to green on black increases hacker rating by 20%
  
  I would recommend Cool retro term for that, but you need to run it on a CRT to make it full.
  
  courier gets you another 15%
  
  Change font into hack gives another 20%
- undefined
  
  cmatrix -rf

Lol, meme's backwards
CLI evangelists try to shit on GUI constantly, as though it makes them better at computers. It doesn't, kids
Can see it in this very thread
- Was gonna say, never had anyone tell me to use a GUI over CLI
  but definitely had the other way around
  
  Was gonna say, never had anyone tell me to use a GUI over CLI
  Do you ever use the CLI, though?
- Lol no. Many posts in this community recently making fun of gimp. Do you see anyone in the comments going WELL ACTUALLY IF YOU JUST USE IMAGEMAGICK? No. Plenty of things to complain about in the big DE's like KDE and Gnome. But do you see people saying "just use tty"? Also no. Meanwhile you mention terminal once and you get at least two randos going on about how ThIs Is WhY LiNuX IsNt ReAdY. The meme is not backwards, your perception of reality is.
  
  Many posts in this community recently making fun of gimp. Do you see anyone in the comments going WELL ACTUALLY IF YOU JUST USE IMAGEMAGICK? No.
  You really don't see why people would suggest using other GUI alternatives for image manipulation? image manipulation?
  Plenty of things to complain about in the big DE's like KDE and Gnome. But do you see people saying "just use tty"? Also no
  "People don't recommend entirely dropping GUI over one or two GUI issues!" Shocker, wow. They do condescendingly say 'just go into terminal and do x,y,z" though, like I said
- But that's what you're doing too. Making the meme the correct way round.
  
  Nope, I encourage people to learn CLI but to also use GUI if it does what they need it to. The insult was only to people who think they're superior for using CLI cuz that's a silly stance
  Just laughing at the meme being backwards from my own personal experience

Did a process last week that took me 13 steps in the command line that took about an hour. If I'd have done it manually it would have taken days. After I worked out how to do it I trimed it down to 6 steps and sent it to my coworker that also needs that information. His eyes glazed over on step two of explaining it to him and he's just going to keep doing it his way....

The only thing worse than reading documentation/tutorials about how to do things in GUIs is writing documentation about how to do things in GUIs. It's just screenshot after screenshot. And following it is like playing a ScummVM game, only less fun and lots more alt+tabbing.
- Screenshots? Look at Mr. Speedy Pants over here!
  In my experience, half the time it's a bloody YouTube video. Nothing says "fun" like having to seek back around in a video to find the next step without waiting 20 extra seconds because you already had to seek back and pause the video after it breezed past an overcomplicated and poorly explained step.
  
  Unregistered hypercam 2 + notepad instructions + evanescence is an aesthetic tho
  
  And the audio is text to speech because it was created by some 12-year-old neckbeard (is that a contradiction?) who is too embarrassed to use their voice on the video they made just to get likes and subscribers.
- If the GUI is good, then it's self documenting.
  I've got a new favorite quote: "I don't need tutorials, I need verbose tooltips." -Wonderbot
- I'm still of the opinion, that your GUI sucks if it needs documentation.

It's all a matter of preference anyway (assuming you have both options anyway). CLI is less intuitive and takes longer to learn, but can be wicked fast if you know what you're doing. GUI is more intuitive and faster to pick up, but digging through the interface is usually slower than what a power user can accomplish in the CLI.
It depends on what your use case is and how you prefer your work flow. The only dumb move is judging how other people like their setup.

CLI is being able to speak a language to tell your computer what to do; GUI is only being able to point and grunt.
- Sometimes you just want to move a file from folder to another.
  
  Shit. I wish we had that option (dragging files between folders) on Linux. Maybe someday.
  (This is a joke, about how it feels like a lot of folks with strong opinions about Linux haven't tried Linux in a long while.)
  
  That’s why file managers, but cp filename folder name is probably quicker if you are already in the terminal
  
  mv a/foo b/bar 🤷
  Definitely not hating if you find the GUI more intuitive. I'm not going to say I use terminal for everything. For instance, I'm using a graphical web browser right now!
  But the more you get comfortable with CLI, the easier it becomes to expand your daily usage to include more and more.
  
  Midnight Commander is my favorite CLI tool in Linux for that sort of thing!
  I have a NAS and sometimes I move shit around and it's easier for me when I have "to"/"from" visually side-by-side.

That’s it, I need to hook up a controller to my PC so I can open Htop with a button press
- Almost as painful as using vim on your phone without an external keyboard
  
  I genuinely use vim inside of termux on a daily basis. I dunno if I'm sick in the head or what, but I kinda like vim on my phone.
- Just use a MIDI controller or an Arduino button box. You can do it!
  
  What are you, a Tintin villain based on Greek stereotypes?
- Personally I just run gotop at startup and keep it on my second monitor. I know it's a small waste of resources but I enjoy watching the blinkenlights.
  
  If you're on Xorg, you can also use xwinwrap to make gotop (or any other app) your wallpaper btw. Kinda useless on a tiling WM tho
- btop could be pretty controller friendly
  
  I love btop!

CLI is effective because every command serves a specific purpose. UIs are the opposite, you have to imagine all possible intentions the user could have at any given point and then indicate possible actions, intuitively block impossible actions, and recover from pretty much any error.
- CLI is effective also because of its history (i.e. one can go back, repeat a command as-is or edit it then repeat) but also the composability of its components. If one made a useful command before, it can be combined with another useful command.
  Rinse & repeat and it makes for a very powerful tool.
  
  The Unix principle of piping between two or even multiple programs, together with “all data should be in the simplest common format possible” (that is, largely unformatted strings), was a really clever invention to be popularized. As proven by the fact it is still so useful decades later on a myriad of computers unimaginably more powerful than what they had back then.
  It’s not perfect by any means (alternative title: why something like Nushell exists), but it’s pretty good all things considered I dare say.

meanwhile Windows users: let me drop into this random strangers discord who claims he will make my PC faster by dropping this .bat file that will run thousands of commands to "debloat" my install. also let me edit the registry and add random values to keys that I don't know what they're used for. this process is basically irreversible because I will inevitably forget which keys I've edited over time, wow windows is so simple and easy and intuitive 🤡
- That's not a windows problem, it's a user problem. The same scenario could play out with a shell script that modifies a hundred dotfiles. Lots of solutions on Linux help forums are "Paste this into your terminal. Don't forget the sudo!"
- Amen. I remember having to frequently reinstall the system to keep it performant. Thanks windows rot.
  
  I used to reinstall Windows once a year. Now with Debian stable I just fix the problem if there is any and that's it.
- I actually used to make backups (Export) of each edited key and keep them in folders with context, so I could later look them up or even set them again in case of a reinstall.
  Now, they are lying, forgotten, on some NTFS drive that I haven't opened in years.
  
  I wonder if registry keys can be set with an ansible script? Granted, that is still not as nice as a declarative config (yay NixOS), but better than having to write down and do by hand again on a new install

Didn't even know there were such a thing as evangelists for Windows
- It's an odd sort of evangelism. They almost never try to convince you Windows is good, just that everything else is worse.
- It doesn't. Nobody loves windows
  
  Hi I like Windows, I use it as my primary development platform
  
  I'd like to introduce you to BetaNews. The second one of the authors posts an article about anything Linux related, there's this group that jumps straight to the comments about how much Linux sucks, it will never replace Windows, these Linux fanboys need to give it up already, etc. It's so consistent that you could set your watch to what they say.
- The ones I met really don't know anything else. If you got to the point of being a Windows power user (slight oxymoron), having to start again on another platform is enraging when it seams different for the sake of it. It seams like others are cheating when achieving more using something else. They aren't playing by the same rules!
  Similarly, if you don't know anything else and don't know Windows really either, change is scary. Basically humans don't like change and will fight to keep things unchanged, rather than embrace and utilize the change.

CLI this, GUI that. Where are my TUI degens?
- Htop is TUI indeed
  
  I love btop, too, though I tried out gotop and it was actually pretty slick.
  Then there's my love, Midnight Commander, but Yazi, Ranger, and Superfile are all great alternatives. TUI file managers are the best compromise between the dangerous sudo rm and the sometimes overbearing GUI file managers.
  I use GUI and CLI evenly and TUI really hits that sweet spot for me.
- My TUI would be better if I could remember how to spell ncmpcpp without tab completion
  
  nc - ncurses
  mpc - music player client
  cpp - C plus plus
- TUI gang rise up

I feel like a lot more people be comfortable using the terminal if the text displayed when it was first opened gave you a list of commands to try. There is a very steep initial learning curve immediately which discourages experimentation, and I think that with a little bit of effort you could get a lot of people over that hump and then they could enjoy terminal Bliss.

I've never met any windows evangelists to be honest. Lots of Apple evangelists though who will spend forever talking about windows. Every developer I've met who uses Windows always had a tongue in cheek sort of "well it kind of sucks in some ways but it's what I'm used to, one day maybe I'll get off my ass and change OS".
Reminds me of the "I use Arch Linux btw" meme which doesn't really happen as much anymore other than as a joke. Also, I use Arch Linux btw
- Every developer I've met who uses Windows always had a tongue in cheek sort of "well it kind of sucks in some ways but it's what I'm used to, one day maybe I'll get off my ass and change OS".
  This used to be me, kind of. I've been an engineer for over 20 years, with the last couple being full time "developer."
  But I finally made that switch at work over a year ago (booting into Linux instead of using a VM) and at home a few months ago. This probably goes without saying, but I am never going back! It's one thing to know there are options out there that people like you prefer, but it's another entirely to get used to the better option then try the enshittified one again.
- Im not an evangelist for windows (I won't try to convert you) but I'm unashamed of being a software engineer who uses Windows as my main dev platform
  
  This is a wild guess but is C# one of your most used languages?

Yesterday I showed a local business owner how he could set up the signboards and menus in his shop using a raspberry pi. The guy is a windows guy. the second he saw the boot screen he balked. I told him they needed to be set up one time and the rest of the time he could manage them with a windows program (winscp). I don't expect to hear back.
They fear CLI.
Another local guy had a huge archive of forestry images. They were all folders that had been renamed for the location and time they were taken but underneath they were all the standard filenames you get from a digital camera. It was nearly twenty years of pictures and he was getting five figure quotes to rename them all to match the folder names. I told him I could build a script to do it so he brought me one of his backups and I promptly did it using CLI before I was going to build a script. The next day he calls to say he talked it over with one of his vendors and they decided to drop their price down to a two thousand dollars. He wasn't interesting in me doing it. I hung up and a few years later when he called me to come fix something someone had messed up I hung up again.
I have no doubt the people he was talking to did something similar probably using bash scripts. So now when I tell someone I can sort out their file naming or some other sorting task I don't let them see how I do it.
- Where do I get the $2000 bash script gig?
  
  I was gonna charge the guy 500 dollars to rename thirty thousand images to match the directory names. Since the guy had switched cameras several times it would have involved more than one simple script but I wasn't being paid for the script. I was being paid to do the job. Except my bash prompt scared the guy. The truth of it is he used me to leverage the company that specialized in data recovery into lowering their price down to a still absurd but much smaller amount.
  Its not the first time I've seen it but when they do something like that to me they burn a bridge.
  A related scam is charging absurd amount to convert and catalog microfiche to images or PDF's. Granted a machine to do this quickly and efficiently is in the 10 to 20 grand range. The process is boring and repetitious and in no way worth the amount some companies want to charge.

Perception: "the CLI is scary and hard to use" Reality: "computer, install gimp" "yessir, that'll be 141MB, is that okay?"
- That didn't work. I got
  computer: Command not found
  
  You gotta do it like this:
- Unless you use Fedora, because I have decided that dnf stands for "do not fucking" so you tell your computer do not fucking install Firefox and then it does it anyway because it has Authority issues
- That is an oversimplification and you know it. Why is it so hard for CLI people to be honest?
  Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare, requiring multiple commands and throwing error messages that you can only find mention of in one unresolved thread on some obscure forum somewhere.
  Plus, there are so many different commands that you have other CLI users saying that they need to pull up reference tools to remember how to do different actions. I have only ever needed to that once or twice ever for GUIs.
  Get real.
  
  Why is it so hard for CLI people to be honest?
  Interesting if unseemly glimpse into your psyche.
  
  Winget install [programname]
  winget search [programname]
  winget upgrade --all --silent
  Oh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!
  
  sudo zypper install programname
  sudo zypper remove programname
  or
  sudo flatpak install programname
  sudo flatpak uninstall programname
  Doesn't get more complicated than that.
  And for updates
  sudo zypper refresh
  sudo zypper update
  sudo flatpak update
  Much faster than opening a GUI, and it didn't take long for me to remember the commands.
  
  Uhhh, maybe if we are talking about back in like 2001?
  I literally manage a fleet of linux end user machines and i can't remember the last time installing software was more than just "pacman -Syu
  <nameofprogram>
  (yes they run arch BTW)
  Why are anti cli people so dishonest about how hard it is? Now, if you are trying to get involved in like machine learning or something then yes that's an absolute nightmare of errors and installing python packages and other nonsense but that's true no matter what platform you're on and whether you have a GUI or not. Even all the fancy gui installers for stuff like stable diffusion are a constant nightmares of I'm not working because fuck you that's not unique to cli
  
  You just need to know the name of the package you need to install.
  On Garuda, you can enter the command in a terminal, and if isn't installed, it will search and give you a list of packages to install from.
  
  Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare
  In my experience, installers are often a nightmare.
  For me, GUI vs CLI have about the same failure rate (for their operating system).
  But I appreciate that the CLI version gives me a message I can search for instead of a "fuck you buddy" pop up box with an "ok" button.
  Edit: There's one case where I have a much harder time with CLI installs - when there's only a CLI "installer" available. I don't blame the CLI for that, I blame the person who shares seven CLI commands instead of writing an installer.
  
  Nah I don't know it, cause that's not been my experience. But admittedly my experience is also pretty limited so maybe I've just yet to run into this myself. I'm just a general use case desktop PC user not doing anything particularly technical.

I have literally never seen whatever this post is referring to
- cool
- This meme format never shows a scenario that isn't made up anymore.

I'm more impressed that they can use a gamepad for CLI input.
- You may not like it but that's how peak productivity looks like.
  /s
- As a Steam Deck user, using a CLI with a gamepad is definitely doable but it is an unpleasant experience.

I mean, the reverse is also true, people have memorized which buttons, menus, etc they need to click/drag with do be productive. Sometimes i m OK with all the clicking, but most times I just want to do the thing now.
Type 3 words or click through 9 context menus. 😅
- Yeah exactly ANY interface made by humans speaks a design language, and it's only "intuitive" insofar as the user understands that language. There's nothing inherently "intuitive" about GUI, it's a language that you've learned through a long process of trial and error. This is painfully obvious to anyone who's ever had to help Grandma reset her gmail password out over the phone. Same for CLI. At first you're copy-pasting commands from tutorials and struggling with man pages, but after a while you get used to the conventions. You learn that -h helps you out and --verbose tells you more and so forth. You could make the case that the GUI design language is more intuitive because it's based of physical objects like buttons and sliders that many people are familiar with, but honestly ever since we abandoned skeumorphic design that argument rings a little hollow.
  
  That's a very nuanced analysis. I've explained it this way especially to people who describe themselves as "bad at computers". Hey, give yourself a break, you've learned a lot about how to cope with windows. But this investment leads to a conservatism--- they dont want to learn coping skills o a new system. The devil you know.
  I'd just add that GUI is more discoverable. When faced with a terminal, what to do? Whereas with a GUI you have a menubar, some icons etc. The GUI gives a lot more hints.
  In the terminal (which I love) it is more powerful once you know how to crack the lid.
  
  This is an incredibly sane dissection, wasn't expecting it under a meme

There are Windows evangelists?? 🤦🏽‍♀️

Memorize? Nah.
I search through my endless command history with fzf and look up commands I don’t remember with cheat.sh

My guy, it's because you're the vegans of tech.
Nobody cares. It doesn't need to be your personality.
- You're not really wrong, but at the same time having technical knowledge is essential to getting us out of the tech dystopia big corporations have us trapped in, and a lot more computer knowledge would not only help people be more productive but it would help them make better choices about the stuff they use. One would assume that as computer technology only becomes more essential to our lives that interest in the technical side would follow, and it doesn't seem to have been the case as much as we are expecting. I mean your average Generation Z person understands that you have to connect your computer to the internet to use the web browser and they're capable of turning the device on but there doesn't seem to be an easy on-ramp from the basic knowledge of how to operate the thing to more advanced topics. I wouldn't even say I'm all that good and I did half a computer science degree

Just the other day, I was trying to run a CLI program, one I won't name.
I'm trying out a new immutable distro, and couldn't install it, so I said hey these new flatpaks are supposed to be all a guy could ever need.
So I downloaded an app that uses this unnamed CLI program as its core. It was a GUI app. And while it worked just fine, I also had very little control over what exactly was gonna happen and how it would happen. I wanted to do some specific things I knew the core program could do, but there was no way to do it.
Eventually I dug deeper and realized I'm an idiot and the CLI program can run without installing it or any dependencies, so it was fine to use natively. I was able to accomplish my task quickly and efficiently after that, happy as a clam.
CLI and GUI both have their place. I prefer GUI most the time, honestly. But having some CLI chops can be extremely useful at times.

Are the "Windows evangelists" in the room with us right now? Every Windows admin I know hates Microsoft with a burning rage. Literally the only people I've ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.
Counterintuitively, that's one reason I like dealing with Windows: the community knows what it is and doesn't pretend otherwise, like some other more "zealous" fan bases.
- Literally the only people I’ve ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.
  Yeah, that's the demographic I had in mind. Lemmy is full of paid shills lol.
  
  it's Linux, who's going to pay them Canonical? IBM? Wait, nvm, I could see IBM having paid shills

On CLI I figure out the command I need once.
Put it in a script.
Cron it if I want it to be daemonized.
Never think about it ever again.
Anti-CLI folks just have a bad workflow.
They see the script as the end, when in reality it's a foundation. I rarely look at my foundation. I build on it.
With this workflow I have dozens, hundreds, or thousand of automatic actions that "just work". Idk, works for me.
That said, if you prefer to click yourself to RSI to accomplish the same task, who am I to judge. I just watch and nod until I'm asked for a suggestion.
- Yes 100%. I used to search the same problems over and over again until I started doing this. Plus this way you can also version them with git and deploy them to other devices.
- i imagine a perfect world in which everything has guis and the guis contain all the information I could want about what it does including the relevant terminal commands. In this way, the gui is also the manual.
  
  People complain KDE has too many settings and option while they are so much less than few cli programs combined. Imagine how cluttered that UI has to be

CLI is fun

Even if it was less productive, I would insist on it, because it's just more fun.
- God dammit you kids are gonna have FUN whether you like it or not!

It's is not either or. Also good cli require an eye for design just like gui. Lots of cli suck because there is no eye.
- Yeah I totally agree. But still, I feel like there are much more terrible GUI programs out there than terrible CLI programs. The only truly awful CLIs I can think of is that tool for managing MegaRAID controllers that has the weird abbreviations everywhere, and shell interfaces to GUI-first bloatware like Dconf that were probably added as an afterthought. I think with CLI there's only so many things that the developer can fuck up. It's all just text. Meanwhile with GUI there are endless opportunities for truly horrid design. Think of Teams. Think of the github web interface. Think of the rddit redesign. Or go watch that Tantacrul video on Sibelius. CLI could never have such a breadth of terribleness.
  
  Arch's package manager is pretty terrible.
  Here's two commands. See if you can guess what they might do:
  sh
  
  pacman -S package_name pacman -Syu
  
  I believe, there's some sort of logic to the letters, but man, most users seriously do not care. They just want to install, update and remove packages 99% of the time, so they shouldn't need to learn that intricate logic for three commands.
  I guess, you could use pkcon to do that instead, but that doesn't really help new users...
  
  i raise you the man command
  
  The good thing about CLIs is that if they suck too much, you can easily create a wrapper around them.

Whenever someone cries about the command line, I just post the link to Cookie clicker for the mousers out there
- chad move tbh

Imo I don't memorize commands. Everything on my zsh is so aliased that I don't think I can teach someone else how to use any other cli.
It just turned into me telling the machine what I want it to do and let it figure out how to rather than me do every little button click step.
- An alias is tantamount to a button click. That’s why this whole thing is so stupid.
  
  It's actually even more efficient because one can search through the list of all available buttons.
  
  So you're right... To an extent... I usually say I'm making a new button when I'm figuring out an alias.
  I guess a better way to express my point is that I'm not geared for interpreting graphics to tell what a button is supposed to do, nor am I cool with needing to press the same buttons in order multiple times.
  On the CLI, all the buttons are named with (impo) meaningful names, and I can combine them into new just-as-accessable buttons whenever I want for free! It might align more with my working frustrations, I hate dragging my eyes over the same text/iconography every time I wanna do something, I want it to just 'happen'. I need a user interface that can react to me faster than I can think and to achieve that I just limit my UI to exactly what I want and I keep it easy for me to expand as I need it.
- reverse-i-search (typically ctrl-r) or ~/.bashrc (or whatever your alternative shell configuration file equivalent is) means one doesn't have to memorize much indeed, especially while commenting properly.

It’s wild that Linux stans are such masochists that they believe they can convert people to loving abuse, instead of just making the interface better to attract users.
- What I consider a "better interface" is almost certainly not what a new user would consider a "better interface."

I've found that one of the best things to do when making a library for something that is going to have a web interface is to first have it work in the terminal. You can much more quickly play around with the design and fix issues there instead of having to work with a more complex web interface.
You just create a simple menu system, like input("1: Feature A\n2: Feature B\n>") and just start trying out all of the different scenarios and workflows.

I used to be on the yelling guys side and boy was I wrong. I now write scripts to do anything repetitive, all the time and it's great. I have a whole library of them I use and add to and improve all the time.
Yeah, I was wrong.
- It always makes me kind of sad when people disparage CLI use. It's like people thinking they don't need to actually learn anything because they can always look up what they need to know on their phone. It seems a shame to miss so much of the richness of the experience. I found myself arguing, promoting, whatever, terminal use a few times and then realized how pointless it is. It's like arguing with someone about what food they like. You can just hope they develop a more sophisticated palate at some point, or at least become more open-minded, but you can't force it on them.
  This was a long way to get around to saying I like that you had that change of frame and are embracing the fun of personalizing your interactions with your computer.
  
  Thanks! Yeah, for me it's that I have a bad memory so memorizing argument orders and things like that felt painful. Scripting is the solution! And you learn while you do it. It's actually kind of fun to make a solid script that works between various OSes as nerdy as that is. I've taken a lot of typing and memorization and turned it into writing (ideally solid) software that allows me to type 1-3 words instead of 20 words. It's satisfying. And you're right, it's something people won't get until they come to it on their own terms.
  At work I routinely do laborious tasks the rest of my team procrastinates due to how repetitive and annoying it is. And often it's with a command or two. It feels quite powerful. And it's so flexible how you can combine languages and tools! It's also just interesting to be reminded how all the basic problems were solved by the 1970s when a lot of these tools were created.

People just don’t want to confess that they are feared from that little black box that apparently kills your whole machine, if you just type a wrong letter having a terminal open. 🤗
As always,
not enough education in society.
If more people would be brave to test it, more people would see that they can interact like this, better. And some, like me, appreciate the hard work GUI designers do, to make stuff more intuitive in the cost of efficiency
I love GUI with integrated terminal, tho, like dolphin
- I honestly think of that single board computers should be more common part of education. That's what the Raspberry Pi was originally envisioned as, a very cheap thing you could equip a whole classroom with to teach them coding, inspired by the BBC micro or whatever it was called that they had back in the '80s. A good way to get people over that fear is to give them something small they basically can't break and even if they do mess it up they can easily restored and they probably didn't lose much of value anyways.
- For me it really depends. I usually prefer the terminal for very simple tasks, or for tasks that are quite complex (complex in the way, that I dont really know what to do and have to look it up), because then its, at least in my opinion, much easier than having to use a GUI. This also includes such simple tasks as creating directories in my filesystem. I prefer the command line than having to open the file Programm, search for the right folder and then again having to search for the "create folder" button in the menu that pops up when doing right click.
  However, I do almost everything regarding file systems (formatting drives etc) with gparted, because its just much more convenient than using a CLI tool.

I mean, legitimately, unless you're doing power user things, you don't really need the terminal. And if you are doing power user things, then find me a Windows power user that has never used the command prompt or powershell.
- I mean, legitimately, unless you’re doing power user things, you don’t really need the terminal.
  This is a fairly recent development, though. Last time I tried Linux I was using the terminal several times a week just browsing the internet and playing games. I've been pleasantly surprised by how infrequently I have to use it now, but I was surprised given my previous experience.
  
  fair enough, I only switched to Linux last February. I do remember it being an absolute pain in the ass in the mid 2010s, I've tried linux a few times over the years. But insofar as now goes, on Mint, the terminal is much the same as the command prompt or PowerShell in windows -- nice for power user functionality, but generally unnecessary for the average user.
- Realizing how often I need to unfuck windows bullshit with regedit, commandline, installing more programs like putty for more command lines and 20 poorly made control panels drove me to linux finally cause I thought I might as well do everything consistently from one place: terminal.
  Now I realize I haven't had to use terminal for anything except tunneling to schools remote server to run a webpage as part of my studies, run npm or to start a local database, things no normal user would ever do. Things I will never do again once I finish my school.

Software would be more useful if every end-user program has both GUI and minimal CLI modules, as in Dolphin vs cp, mv etc.
Why?
GUI: Year of the Linux smartphone
CLI: Automation, scripting.
- TUI is a subset of GUI that uses text in a terminal to render UI elements. It does not make automation any easier. What you want is called CLI.
- For a program at work the scripting language is Delphi and the Documentation is not available. If you want to know something call the support. CLI is not an option.
  It'd be really useful to have a CI run, but that is never going to happen.
  
  Try xdotool

Noooo, you cannot have a consistent UI/UX experience across platforms with decades old commands and tools, my imaginary grandma might get confused, also you need three IT degrees to type "man command" into a term window.
- Tbf, most man files are not easy to understand. Between man, tldr, ArchWiki, and an occasional O'Reilly book I can usually get things done, but documentation on Linux still has a lot of room for improvement.
  
  Other than stuff like ffmpeg - which has so many features that a man page just can't cut it; and sed - which doesn't have a simple hyperlink saying "you go here to learn sed regexp", most man pages do what I need them to do.
  You just need to learn the basics of how the man page is organised and what the brackets in the SYNOPSIS section mean and that makes using them much easier.
  We also have man man for that purpose.
- “man command”
  This is why I hate linux, it appeals to the male fantasy !!!
  
  I guess you never heard of the finger command.
- It's more about most people don't have time to learn all the commands to be a sufficient enough user. I don't want to dig through an endless stream of AI slop articles hallucinating me the commands I need for something, nor have the time and money to retreat from society "to learn it properly". Also often the things I do is more intuitive for a button or shortcut press (I have made a card for my keyboard for F-keys) rather than typing in every time the commands.
  Going CLI from GUI feels like ripping out the interiors and the dashboard from your car to make it slightly lighter the same way race cars are done, but instead you're doing it to the family car. Sure, a lot of GUI is now a web app, because some techbro in the 2010's wanted to ~~collect our data for advertisement opportunities and creating the Torment Nexus~~ free us from software installations, so we could just type www . wordprocessor . com into the URL bar of our browser instead of running the spooky and scary wordprocessorexe after running the even spookier and scarier wordprocessor_install_1_6_5exe. This in turn lead to a lot of student being over-reliant on HTML-like formatting for UI, and GTK and Qt not being taught in turn, which also could serve as lightweight and mostly cross-platform GUI. I even created my own GUI subsystem in my game engine for its editors.
  A lot of problems caused by those on the top are being blamed on "normie users", because we need to be "ideologically neutral", except when it comes to "supressed" ideologies...
  
  you don't have to memorize the commands, just use tldr command and apropos to your advantage.
  Everything will seem difficult when you're not used to it and are changing habit, it's not just a GUI to CLI thing.
- "imaginary grandma" is a crazy form of grandparent-denying gaslighting and I will absolutely start using it
- That varies from command to command though. man is nice if you know how to use the command but have forgotten which option does what you want. But if you have no idea how to use a program, reading e.g. man awk will not be very helpful

The weirdest thing for me is when people complain about terminal when there is a meme how much easier it is to do something on Linux compared to windows or MacOS.
Terminal is the easiest way to highlight that for a meme.
- Ironically, in Linux, if I ever see a Terminal, it's because I opened it. If I'm doing stuff in GUI, terminals never pop up.
  In Windows, doing stuff in GUI a blank terminal opens up and goes away during GUI interaction, or while executing background tasks occasionally.
- If only windows and macos included a terminal...
  
  I hate powershell so much
  Why does it have to be so verbose
  
  Ofc they do. But most users don't use it at all. Even most windows admins (based on my experience) don't know PowerShell which doesn't mean they know how to use CMD.

I am an elder millennial who never forgot the MS-DOS commands of my childhood. So I would kick that guys arse!
- when i was a kid i used to make fake autoexec.bat scripts that did nothing just to pretend :3
  
  I never touched that file. Actually wait I did. I put in a quick script to run the Gmouse.exe. Basically to run the mouse driver which you had to do manually every time! But with it there you could automate it and not worry about it.
  Ahh, gmouse...pkunzip (which I called Punk unzip). Fun times.

Think this is more of a accessibility thing. No one denies the CLI is really efficient to use if you're a professional, it shouldn't be the norm that you have to be proficient with it to use your computer to the fullest though. Nor to receive help if you don't feel comfortable using it.
It would be nice if everyone could enjoy free and trustworthy computing, including people who either can't or won't learn many dozens text commands and paradigms.

Frame #2 looks like top- everyone here should try btop!
- I thought htop was everything I needed till I switched and saw the light
  
  The screenshot is http I think. I came to the comments to suggest btop, but was beaten to it. ❤️
- It actually looks like htop. Is btop better?
  
  Btop will also show disc and network utilization while running much lighter than glances. Personally I keep both btop and htop installed on all of my machines because I feel like htop is better for quickly killing a processes when needed
  
  I use btop on my personal systems and like it a lot.. Have not tried it on large scale heavily loaded production machines -would want to evaluate resource usage first.
  
  I love it, may as well try it out- see if you also love it

CLIs are almost always magnitudes more expressive than their feeble, derivative GUIs.

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