The Case Against GUIs, Revisited 720
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia advocates the importance of the command line, in light of the increasing use of GUIs in today's technologies, as well as the increasing perception among admins that proponents of the CLI are dragging computing back to the 'dark ages of the C:\ prompt."
Re:Dead on (Score:5, Informative)
And when's the last time you edited photos, video, or audio with a CLI?
When I was a sysadmin at a radio station, I wrote scripts that processed audio, including cutting and splicing. Having it automated saved a hell of a lot of time for the people that used to have to sit in front of a GUI and do it.
Of course, there's all kinds of audio work that couldn't be done by script. The point is, you need both kinds, even for audio and video.
Re:First post (Score:4, Informative)
To quote an ancient proverb -- "You can often learn to use a GUI in a day, and pay for that knowledge for the rest of your life."
The Unix Way is to be able to chain together large numbers of short, relatively easy to use, powerful commands to create tasks that save days of work in a GUI, if any GUI exists that can facilitate doing them at all. Sure, it takes a while to learn, requires intelligence, is "expert friendly", but in the end you can work friggin' magic. That's why they call the masters of this "gurus" and call the masters of the Windows GUI "MCSEs".
And yeah, even the best of the gurus use the man pages all of the time. Why waste neurons memorizing every single option to ls, or tar, or convert? It is enough to know the command name and that an option exists -- the computer itself is an extension of your brain that remembers every tiny option on request, if you choose to use it that way. And when you can't remember the name of the command, or aren't sure one exists, there is first "apropos", and then things like "yum list \*whatever\*" or google.
GUIs are often stupid, nearly always broken somewhere, only do what the designer thought they should do (which often leaves out any sort of control at all over all sorts of functionality known only to those who understand what lies behind the curtain where the command line provides access), and are slow and inefficient for nearly all tasks except things like "drawing" or otherwise "manipulating graphics" or "playing games", largely because they force you to take your fingers off of the home keys to use them.
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