-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kai Ponte wrote:
On Tuesday 28 October 2008 10:48:44 am G T Smith wrote:
There's no reason in 2008 to have to drop down to a 1980's UI. Pardon, GUI is a 1980s technology... and frankly has not advanced much since then. GUI interfaces are good for those who need to work with a Computer but usually a royal pain for those who need on a computer. The CLI is lot more powerful than a GUI for a lot of tasks in the same way that phonetic alphabets are usually more useful and flexible than pictographic languages.
Yes, I know the GUI came out in the '80s. I still have a Macintosh SE. However, I was more referring to my TRS-80 and Apple II interfaces.
Never much liked these myself (motorola kit had few common standards)... started on CP/M, p-Code, later DOS, and VT100/200 etc on Vaxes and and DEC10/20s, (one could do a lot of interesting things on a VT terminal), and if you have not patched Wordstar to run with a weird terminal with debug you have never learnt pain.. :-) First brush with SunTools on a SUN workstation was a bit of an eye opener, IIRC pre dated the MAC somewhat...
However, there should be no reason a command-line should be more or less powerful than a gui. In this day, one should be able to choose.
I assume you got this the wrong way round GUIs syntactically are usually a lot more simple than their CLI equivalents and therefore often less powerful at certain tasks. It really is the difference between a reader for an 8 year old and a grammar book. On the other hand GUIs have implicit non-linear command sequences whereas to get similar on the CLI needs some explicit juggling.
I don't have time or patience to remember command line options any more. I want to use my computer and having a menu available at a right-click is much more convenient.
Control R, auto completion and scripting usually have this pretty well covered (and most of the common options are pretty standard anyway). Tools like mc without the GUI overheads are much more efficient than the equivalent GUI tools...
Let's take converting 100 pictures from 1024x768 to 640x480 for a slide show. I can do that in the CLI - with a little help - but I would much prefer right-clicking the pictures and then having some program be available for that purpose.
That works well enough until you want to select that 100 out of 1000, and not overwrite the originals or something similar. It is really about selecting the tool for the task, for some things GUI is good for others CLI is more appropriate. However, working with visual media a GUI has obvious advantages If you are eating soup you do not normally use a fork.... I have two main issues with GUIs most GUI tools effectively say do it my way or not do it all, and when coding one can spend more time getting the GUI right than on the thing which actually does the work...
Also - notice the word convenient in the previous paragraph. It was originally spelled wrong. Were I in the CLI, I would never know. Being in a GUI, I see it highlighted in red and am able to correct.
/soapbox
An interesting spin on this is.... http://www.thomasscoville.com/PCarticle.html - -- ============================================================================== I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. Bjarne Stroustrup ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkkISH0ACgkQasN0sSnLmgJwBgCfSHfKmUZ4KdCvWkj4FIraP2Rl +YAAoIxOH/DeuCvXCFb2/MD8ccz6CLOy =dfbh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org