Case for returning to Command Line Interfaces en masse

[ygolo]

I am not saying GUIs are bad, per se. But for complex things, having the command line option is much more productive.

Whenever I need to do something on modern software, I find myself searching for steps on how to do it, and invariably I find something that is akin to:
GUI selection Level 1 > GUI selection Level 2 > GUI selection Level 3

They often come with pictures of where to click each option. Also, almost invariably, those pictures won't match my GUI. There is something different. Maybe the operating systems are different. Maybe the aspect ratio on my monitor is different--reconfiguring the GUI in unintuitive ways. Maybe the source of how to do it is out of date. Maybe the software I have is. Some combination of version mismatch makes it so I have to hunt all over the GUI system to find where my option for accessing is different.

Consider an alternate scenario where you find where the command line input is and you just type in "Word_1 Word_2 Word_3" with exactly the same meanings as the GUI options would have. This ability still exists in some software and was very common in most software for a while. What happened to that? Searching for answers on the internet is more common and easier than ever. Why create this artificial time-waster by removing the option for a command line interface to your software?

Imagine the amount of time saved by the person creating the source information and for the person using the looked up information for doing all sorts of things.

Rant about using videos for explanations

Instead of pictures, now more often explanations are videos--the worst of both worlds. It takes more space than pictorial explanations and is more sequential than words.

If you wanted answers for something, it used to be that you search and you get a direct explanation of the thing with important concepts and simple things to type on a rather plain looking website. Now you have to sit through a 10 minute explanation where you see and listen to people fumble, have to pause just to see what the explainer clicked, and eventually the time feels like a total waste because your GUI has the options in different places than the video makers.

Three words and 30 seconds on the side of the explainer and the user are now replaced by hours on the part of the creator of the explainer and minutes on the consumer of the explainer.

Another rant on the decline of software

This is yet another version of the type of waste that software as an industry has gotten itself into. It's not the really cool stuff that has deteriorated. It is the very basic day-to-day stuff. Software has in general gotten buggier, more unnecessarily complicated, and more consequential over its history. This is a bad mix.

Just the other day when picking up prescriptions, the display of names of people whose medications were ready had a ridiculous number of issues. The names overran each other; sometimes the names would not scroll from page to page because some base software library had an issue; and the warning about that issue would keep popping up.

Mind you the same function was working amazingly well on an antiquated system the displayed names on an LED board just the previous time I was there. How do you mess up something that an intern would be able to implement in pure hardware if they wanted?

 

[Coriolis]

This is something I appreciate about Linux. Anything can be done from the command line. Modern Linux distros also offer a GUI option for most things, but it is easily avoided. GUI's came hand in hand with multitasking, but they certainly were not required. There was a product called Desqview by Quarterdeck that allowed multitasking in a command-line, or at least non-graphical environment. It was quickly pushed out by graphical approaches.