• 6 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’m excluding TUI’s because you’re right, they’re pretty different and share some of the ununiformity of GUIs. Still, the command line world remains vast and with that interface you can do a lot, and it is fairly uniform.

    there’s parameters

    That doesn’t change the uniformity of the interface. Of course every application will need different parameters. Now do they receive these different parameters via a similar and uniform interface? I say yes. I enter it via keyboard, and for the most part they all use space delimited flags, most of them hyphenated. I’d call that pretty uniform.

    To phrase it another way, if all GUIs started using the same names for all parameters, it remains non-uniform interface, and it wouldn’t solve 1% of the issue with GUIs.

    Out of curiosity, if you don’t see the CLI world as more uniform, why do you use it and for what benefit do you prefer it?










  • Every command has its own syntax

    I don’t consider this a different interface. Where you draw the line is a personal choice, but I’d be happy with a smartphone equivalent where the differences are similar to command line tools having different syntax.

    editing files is something completely different

    I should have clarified, but by editing files, I don’t mean the vim-like full text editor experience. I mean things like appending text to a file with echo >>, or using sed, etc.

    A lot of these interfaces are like they are for mostly historical reasons

    Yes, legacy baggage exists. This only furthers my point, that things could be even better using the same principles, without legacy baggage.

    Termux

    I only use Termux out of necessity (app or functionality I can only access via a terminal). If an app with good ergonomics exists, I wouldn’t look at Termux. But I would still look at command line on desktop.