On GUI-shaming and a mountain of hot takes

Why not a hybrid approach? There is this concept of "best tool for the job" rather than "use one tool, and only one tool EVER"

Reading through this, I see mixed opinions on both sides. I'm a developer who actively uses both sides throughout each and every day for different purposes.

For instance, I do all of my main development on Windows, so Sublime Text is my editor of choice. I have no qualms about dropping to console on servers to edit configs in nano though.

I use TortoiseGit to manage my repositories, but again, can still drop to console for more complex tools or server work. I find that a solid GUI in Tortoise suite of tools offers a significantly better diffing experience than anything I've seen on console to date, plus its easier to setup .gitignore lists or dealing with submodules. But when things break, recovery needs to happen on the console.

I've also come to love htop as a replacement for top as a "task manager" equiv on the console. With using it through PuTTy, it still supports mouse commands, so I can simply click on rows to select items, just like a normal GUI application. I think this is a prime example of what a hybrid application COULD do, if others followed this style.

GUI's can be great. CLI programs can be terrible. The one actual benefit of CLI's seems to me to be the ability to craft a programming environment yourself, hopefully composing tools together to get your work done. But that's a skill that takes time to see benefits.

At work we recently discussed this Quora piece about whether 'dark mode' (white text on black background) is better for your eyes.

It's not. Years of research has shown that it's not. Yet many of us persist in using a black terminal screen (including me) and judging people who don't.

And I think this is a lot of what goes on in the debate about these tools. It's not the actual utility that's being compared. It's usually whether it looks 'cool' and a bit like Hackers Mr. Robot. We'll all say it's because it's more efficient, but it's more likely because we like it.

Software development: still the newest sector of the fashion industry.

I generally agree with everything you've written above. I do feel like a big piece that's often missing in these discussions is the acknowledgement of the assumption that everyone starts with - that we all have the same understanding / conception of how things work / flow / etc in our heads. We don't. And it's not that my version is more right than yours, or that yours is more right than mine, it's that our own systems are based on our own understandings.

There are numerous things I find painful when others do them (like two finger typing). However, unless someone asks, it's not my place to provide any advice on how they should change or even why they should change. And for everything that may make me cringe, there's always something else they do that I can learn from.

However, there's something that actually bugs me even more about these discussions. And it's this idea that if you're not doing everything the most efficient way possible, then you're doing it wrong. That you have to have the right (or better) setup. An implication that somehow four extra clicks somehow equals being 40% worse at what you're doing.

We'd all be better off if we stopped this endless races towards "perfect" productivity and actually put the brakes on and slowed ourselves down. The actual time I spend typing code is a small fraction of the time I'm actually spending on the problem. Those few extra seconds or minutes here and there, also give me a chance to more carefully think through my actions - and whether I choose to do so via GUI or CLI doesn't matter.

I hope we can reduce the amount of gatekeeping in the developer community in general. Part of the beauty of programming is that the barrier to entry is low (compared to a lot of other STEM fields), but some people feel the need to construct artificial barriers.

Two random comments...

• I'm a long time (25 year) VIM user. Sublime/VSCode/RubyMine/Jetbrains all terrify me. I'm amazed at the people that are productive in them and sometimes a bit envious :)

• I used to work with a designer that used a stylus/tablet. He never used a single keyboard short cut. Need to copy something he'd go to the menu. Need to paste, back to the menu. Keep in mind this was in Photoshop. It was so aggravating to watch and yet he was just as productive and fast as the other designers and one of the best I've worked with.

I am generally a CLI person but that's mainly out of habit and familiarity more than anything

I find it interesting how people go on and on and about how more "efficient" one can be with git for example on the command line compared to a GUI

Software development isn't a race.

What's the difference between someone who can commit some new code and push it in the CLI in ~2 seconds vs a GUI user in ~10 seconds. Nothing, who cares?

There's much bigger fish to fry.

What people should know about GUIs is that, at best, they provide the same features as the CLI version. I mean, you will always lose something by using the GUI version of any app.

But that's not their worst limitation.

As @gypsydave5 brilliantly described in his post about the Unix way, you also lose the inter-operability of Unix. I mean, you can't pipe your app to another app if you're in a GUI. You're inside a kind of box where all you can do is only what the developers of the app wanted to put in it.

But if it suits your needs, who cares?

At the end of the day, GUIs and CLIs are just that - interfaces to accomplish your tasks. I'll use the best tool for the job. A lot of people hate on GUIs but there are many poorly designed CLIs as well.

For a beginner, GUIs can be better mainly for 2 reasons:

• discoverability - GUIs show possible tasks through menus. Many also come with a useful Help menu. Beginners are unaware of many possible use-cases of a tool. Getting help in the command-line is non-obvious to beginners.
• familiarity - Familiarity with existing software you may have used e.g browsers, file managers, Word/Excel etc. This makes GUIs less off-putting to beginners who may otherwise be daunted by the learn curve.

As people in this thread have mentioned, power-users like CLIs because of the scope for automation and composability.

A problem with GUIs is the fear of a software update removing/re-organizing your familiar menu/sub-menus or even worse, some wholesale design change like those Material Redesigns which seem to change the UI/UX just for the heck of it.

Great post!

I think in a profession where impostor syndrome can run rampant, being overzealous and participating in/subjected to holy wars over tools/workflows/etc. is, unfortunately, a major byproduct of that condition; people are always going to try and find some form of validation that they aren't a total moron, especially in this industry, and so if you are a vim user and buy into it being THE text editor that REAL PROGRAMMERS use, then anyone who uses anything else is challenging that belief system that you've invested in as a way to prove your worth (both to yourself and others).

This is also compounded by the fact that the amount of stuff to "know" about programming is increasing at an exponential rate; it's no longer sufficient to merely know a language, you also need to be familiar with associated frameworks, different IDEs, etc.

That was a great thread with all the contexts provided, Ben.

This post came about at a funny time as I was looking at this GUI editor for designing GraphQL schema.

I am not used to GraphQL at all so was looking for easy way to get started with GraphQL schema design.

for people who don't want to invest the time and effort in trying to find out how something really works

It's not that I don't want to invest time & effort, but I want to get started to s**k a bit less.

I believe GUI tools help you visualize the flow your tools and would help when you want to get your hands dirty.

So I consider GUI a valuable tool.

I don't take an extreme stance that GUI is better or CLI is better. I'd just stick with whatever works the best at the current situation.

I don't generally shame people for being gui-based, but I do encourage them to learn terminal-centric tools. If you don't, the second you need to access a server without a desktop environment, you're kind of sunk. For me, that's every server.

I'll also admit that I know very few people who are well versed in terminal usage, and are not equally capable with IDEs and common gui tools. When hiring, I expect to see both.

Yup, the "GUIs are for people who don't want to invest the time and effort in trying to find out how something really works." attitude makes my eyes roll. Just because I don't have to send emails like:

gmail send --email recipient:a@a.com message:who the hell would want to send emails like this

Doesn't mean I don't understand how emails work or how to use them. We developed GUIs in, like, the 1970s for a reason? Perhaps the world of programming needs to catch up a bit.

I use Jupyter Notebook and gedit when I develop and test. This is partly a matter of convenience in that didn’t grow up using the tty; I grew up using GUIs. Another good part of GUIs is that they lend themselves well to using more tools than just a keyboard, like a mouse.

I find myself using the command line when a piece of software on our Unix cluster needs single (e.g. vi), or systematic (e.g. sed) fixes, and I suspect it’d be faster than scp-ing the file to my machine for editing.

That said, I do like the idea of getting everybody familiar with the tty and the spirit of Unix-likeness. Some of my favorite programs I’ve written are little shell scripts that free up hours 🙂🙂🙂

GUI is for People who use trackpad/mouse and keyboard while CLI users are all keyboards.

When Figma/Adobe XD/Photoshop/Illustrator used CLI for the first time. trying to find the navigation bar/Side bar, Cmd+C(Ctrl+C) as cancel(terminate). Right Click as Paste instead of Ctrl+V.

I like to be more of hybrid than choosing a side. I am learning it and at the same time can cope up with someone who has experience in both GUI and CLI.

Basically.

There's definitely a bit "we did it hard and proper way 10 years ago, so that's how we do things now".

When talking specifically about git, check out Sourcetree. They do break the damn thing every now and then with releases, but it's brilliant tool for managing git.