It's different, it's unfamiliar territory and I'm pretty dumb. But I need it. I need to get on that linux like a fish needs water. I will be joining the linux soon enough, or so help me God.
" i shouldn't have to memorize commands"
the up arrow:
The commands: ls cp mv...
Meanwhile you get Windows people who memorize things like Get-AllUsersHereNowExtraLongJohn
Get-ListOfFunnyPowershellReferences++
(Seriously...ExtraLongJohn is damn funny)
Get-command -noun <string[]>
Handy AF
Just wait until they learn about ctrl-R haha
I've seen people not realize tab autocompletes.
I learned that tab=autocomplete when I first played minecraft in grade school haha. I just assumed that it was common knowledge but apparently not...
I'm the type to spend 10 minutes going through my previous commands, rather than 5 seconds typing it.
Thatโs it, I need to hook up a controller to my PC so I can open Htop with a button press
Almost as painful as using vim on your phone without an external keyboard
I genuinely use vim inside of termux on a daily basis. I dunno if I'm sick in the head or what, but I kinda like vim on my phone.
The only thing worse than reading documentation/tutorials about how to do things in GUIs is writing documentation about how to do things in GUIs. It's just screenshot after screenshot. And following it is like playing a ScummVM game, only less fun and lots more alt+tabbing.
Screenshots? Look at Mr. Speedy Pants over here!
In my experience, half the time it's a bloody YouTube video. Nothing says "fun" like having to seek back around in a video to find the next step without waiting 20 extra seconds because you already had to seek back and pause the video after it breezed past an overcomplicated and poorly explained step.
If the GUI is good, then it's self documenting.
I've got a new favorite quote: "I don't need tutorials, I need verbose tooltips." -Wonderbot
Are there people who are mad at other people for using the terminal? Is this really a thing that exists?
There are definitely people who think it is reasonable to memorize button locations and 10 levels of menus in GUI programs but would rather go into cardiac arrest than use something like program --option input-file output-file.
thing with gui is you don't need to memorize button locations and menus. If you do it's poor layout. Good gui lets you find things you didn't know you were looking for intuitively, without external resources or manual. CLI requires you to know what exactly you are doing and is impossible to use without external resources. Nothing against terminal but unless you know what you are doing and every command required to complete that action, it's ass. If gui was so bad and cli was so good, guis would not be used by anyone.
I mean you dont go around copy pasting device ids and running commands for 20 minutes to connect your device through terminal when it is done with 2 clicks in the gui even by someone who has never used a pc before.
To be fair if you want to learn your options (without properly informing yourself using a manual) tab complete can be useful if implemented.
Also most programs come with their manuals so I'd barely call it external. The manuals are also usually better than what I've come to expect from the text to go with buttons in a GUI.
Knowing what commands are required is always going to be necessary but there's also not that many worth remembering.
Not really. But you know, gotta find ways to feel smarter than other people so here we go.
And those Windows evangelists! Don't we all know 'em with their strong opinions about operating systems? *shakes fist at cloud*
meanwhile Windows users: let me drop into this random strangers discord who claims he will make my PC faster by dropping this .bat file that will run thousands of commands to "debloat" my install. also let me edit the registry and add random values to keys that I don't know what they're used for. this process is basically irreversible because I will inevitably forget which keys I've edited over time, wow windows is so simple and easy and intuitive ๐คก
That's not a windows problem, it's a user problem. The same scenario could play out with a shell script that modifies a hundred dotfiles. Lots of solutions on Linux help forums are "Paste this into your terminal. Don't forget the sudo!"
i dont use the terminal to be productive, i use it to feel like a hacker
Setting the colorscheme to green on black increases hacker rating by 20%
I use Linux and I prefer GUIs. I'm the kind of person that would rather open a filemanager as superuser and drag and drop system files than type commands and addresses. I hope you hax0rs won't forget that we mere mortals exist too and you'll make GUIs for us ๐๐๐
Tbf, the file explorer is actually one really good argument for GUIs over terminals. Same with editing text. Its either simple enough to use Nano or I need a proper text editor. I don't mess around with vim or anything like that that.
Its all tools. Some things are easier in a file manager, some things are easier in a GUI.
CLI is effective because every command serves a specific purpose. UIs are the opposite, you have to imagine all possible intentions the user could have at any given point and then indicate possible actions, intuitively block impossible actions, and recover from pretty much any error.
Are the "Windows evangelists" in the room with us right now? Every Windows admin I know hates Microsoft with a burning rage. Literally the only people I've ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.
Counterintuitively, that's one reason I like dealing with Windows: the community knows what it is and doesn't pretend otherwise, like some other more "zealous" fan bases.
Literally the only people Iโve ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.
Yeah, that's the demographic I had in mind. Lemmy is full of paid shills lol.
I mean, the reverse is also true, people have memorized which buttons, menus, etc they need to click/drag with do be productive. Sometimes i m OK with all the clicking, but most times I just want to do the thing now.
Type 3 words or click through 9 context menus. ๐
Yeah exactly ANY interface made by humans speaks a design language, and it's only "intuitive" insofar as the user understands that language. There's nothing inherently "intuitive" about GUI, it's a language that you've learned through a long process of trial and error. This is painfully obvious to anyone who's ever had to help Grandma reset her gmail password out over the phone. Same for CLI. At first you're copy-pasting commands from tutorials and struggling with man pages, but after a while you get used to the conventions. You learn that -h helps you out and --verbose tells you more and so forth. You could make the case that the GUI design language is more intuitive because it's based of physical objects like buttons and sliders that many people are familiar with, but honestly ever since we abandoned skeumorphic design that argument rings a little hollow.
That's a very nuanced analysis. I've explained it this way especially to people who describe themselves as "bad at computers". Hey, give yourself a break, you've learned a lot about how to cope with windows. But this investment leads to a conservatism--- they dont want to learn coping skills o a new system. The devil you know.
I'd just add that GUI is more discoverable. When faced with a terminal, what to do? Whereas with a GUI you have a menubar, some icons etc. The GUI gives a lot more hints.
In the terminal (which I love) it is more powerful once you know how to crack the lid.
Whenever someone cries about the command line, I just post the link to Cookie clicker for the mousers out there
It's is not either or. Also good cli require an eye for design just like gui. Lots of cli suck because there is no eye.
CLI is being able to speak a language to tell your computer what to do; GUI is only being able to point and grunt.
It's all a matter of preference anyway (assuming you have both options anyway). CLI is less intuitive and takes longer to learn, but can be wicked fast if you know what you're doing. GUI is more intuitive and faster to pick up, but digging through the interface is usually slower than what a power user can accomplish in the CLI.
It depends on what your use case is and how you prefer your work flow. The only dumb move is judging how other people like their setup.
Perception: "the CLI is scary and hard to use" Reality: "computer, install gimp" "yessir, that'll be 141MB, is that okay?"
I do most of my work at the command line, my co-workers do think I'm nuts for doing it, but one of our recent projects required us all to log into a client's systems, and a significant portion of the tasks must be done via bash prompt. Suddenly, I'm no longer the team weirdo, I'm a subject matter expert.
On CLI I figure out the command I need once.
Put it in a script.
Cron it if I want it to be daemonized.
Never think about it ever again.
Anti-CLI folks just have a bad workflow.
They see the script as the end, when in reality it's a foundation. I rarely look at my foundation. I build on it.
With this workflow I have dozens, hundreds, or thousand of automatic actions that "just work". Idk, works for me.
That said, if you prefer to click yourself to RSI to accomplish the same task, who am I to judge. I just watch and nod until I'm asked for a suggestion.
I used to be on the yelling guys side and boy was I wrong. I now write scripts to do anything repetitive, all the time and it's great. I have a whole library of them I use and add to and improve all the time.
Yeah, I was wrong.
Did a process last week that took me 13 steps in the command line that took about an hour. If I'd have done it manually it would have taken days. After I worked out how to do it I trimed it down to 6 steps and sent it to my coworker that also needs that information. His eyes glazed over on step two of explaining it to him and he's just going to keep doing it his way....
There is nothing productive about searching online for some stupid command that is outdated for 2 years, breaks some shit and then you need another 2 hours to unfuck it because it's not obvious from the long noodle of a command how to revert it. For something that could just be 3 clicks through control panel that every idiot could navigate without having to use online search engine.
Memorize? Nah.
I search through my endless command history with fzf and look up commands I donโt remember with cheat.sh
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
sudo in Windows.Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.