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5y

Why did we move away from CLIs?

I wonder if there's been any research into wether memorising keywords is more of a load than remembering where to point and click. But to be fair, once the foundations are there, GUIs can be pretty intuitive.

I'm not sure what I'm talking about anymore.

Comments
  • 7
    We moved away from them so normies can use computers.
  • 13
    Because well made GUIs offer discoverability and follow the concept of information scent.

    On the other hand, GUIs are more difficult to automate, that's why servers usually are on CLI.
  • 0
    @shoop I'd assume the same but was wondering if there's any proof of that
  • 4
    Not all of us did :)
  • 0
  • 1
    I think it's that guis usually follow the principal of "expected by users" across all of their experiences. It can be jarring and confusing if one gui has a different opinion on UX than another but this is taken away by terminals.

    However, commands on terminals can be very confusing and cryptic because of the use of flags and the lack of documentation around what each flag/value does. There's very rarely a helpful error message to say "if you use this flag, you can't use that other one."
  • 2
    Point and click is easier to leran, CLI is (usually) faster once you've got the muscle memory down.

    Computers have moved from the domain of the "very nerdy" to "nerdy" to "everyone has one", so it's only natural the interfaces have evolved in the same way.

    That being said, it now seems like they're moving back to the "only the nerdy have them" camp, as everyone else says "but I can do everything I need to on my tablet!" So perhaps they'll go back to the way they were 😂
  • 0
    Both have their pros and cons, once GUIs became cheap enough to be commonplace they started being dominant for things they're good at. CLIs always stayed where they really worked.
  • 2
    inb4 cli2gui.
  • 2
    @Wisecrack say no more fam
    *starts new electron project
  • 0
    @AleCx04

    Don't know about electron but Do it anyway if you can. Would be a cool project.

    Also cli2gui would be great because I FUCKING HATE the cli.

    I'd do it in golang and fyne if I had the time.
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