[crazygringo]

> GUIs are deeply nested. And context sensitive so it may not even be possible to see actions until certain condition is met.

This is a feature, not a bug.

For me, browsing 20 pages of --help or man is a discoverability nightmare. I don't want to wade through arcane option after arcane argument.

The GUI gives me a well-organized top-level understanding of the program: organized menus, and organized panes (panels/palettes/tabs/etc.). Then I can drill deeper into dialog boxes and tool settings as needed.

It's far more efficient to quickly browse a GUI to figure out the lay of the land, than it is to wade through what is essentially the reference manual of a CLI tool.

Reference manuals are the opposite of discoverability.

[cuddlybacon]

> This is a feature, not a bug.

Seconded.

The hard part of CLIs is discovering what is possible in the current context. You can almost take for granted that a GUI will do this for you. CLI not only won't, but will often fail to discuss this in the man page.

While there are exceptions (eg tmux), I find most man pages are written for someone who already knows how the command works but forgot a particular detail.

[cvlasdkv]

> While there are exceptions (eg tmux), I find most man pages are written for someone who already knows how the command works but forgot a particular detail.

Isn't that a function of how much work is put into man pages vs. the GUI? I'd be hesitant to claim that if you took the same number of hours in writing a GUI and put it into writing better documentation that we'd be in the same place we often are with poorly documented tooling.

[camgunz]

CLIs and GUIs aren’t an either/or proposition. They each implement very different paradigms; OP goes over them pretty reasonably. You’re not supposed to discover a CLI; you’re either supposed to remember the 4 things you do all the time (see git) or script it and build your own interface/program (see coreutils or stuff like troff). It’s an entirely different UI. Arguing that CLIs aren’t discoverable misses the point just as much as arguing that GUIs aren’t composable. They’re not supposed to be.

[hhas01]

“CLIs shouldn’t be discoverable because they’re not supposed to be discoverable.”

Imagine if we applied the same defeatist tautological thinking to our other written materials: books wouldn’t have TOCs or indexes, the Web wouldn’t have search engines, and so on.

10,000 years of the written word, yet nothing is learnt. SMH.

Maybe if text-based interfaces did provide good, safe discovery they wouldn’t have been beaten into a cocked hat by GUIs for 99% of users. And this is despite GUI being something of a UX trap itself (as CLI fans are happy to point out), becoming ever moreso as personal computing moves beyond traditional physical point-and-click and expands into voice control.

Honestly, there’s more text smarts in a modern smartphone’s txt-ing interface than in today’s “cutting edge” of 1970s CLI design.

Is it really about providing good UI/UX, or about preserving the entrenched power structures of the computing world status quo?

--

“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.”—Keith Braithwaite

[camgunz]

It's not a tautology, it's choosing how something works. Try it with other things:

"Guitars shouldn't have reeds because they're not supposed to have reeds"

"Cars shouldn't have pitch controls because they're not supposed to have pitch controls"

> Maybe if text-based interfaces did provide good, safe discovery they wouldn’t have been beaten into a cocked hat by GUIs for 99% of users.

This isn't so much CLI vs. GUI but interactive vs. non-interactive. Think CLI vs. TUI. Then (hopefully, I guess) you'll realize that it's a deliberate difference in paradigm vs. one or the other being superior.

Indeed, this is the entire point of OP. Reification of the interaction means making that interaction first-class, and CLIs do this by making the interaction the invocation, which you can then manipulate. You can't (mostly, w/o some kind of session scripting tool or w/e) do that in a GUI or TUI.

Kind of a lot of heated discussion about this but, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.

[cma]

I rarely wade through it and just search for what I'm looking for. Typing '-i' (in the session, not as a param) will make the search case insensitive if using 'less'.

[crazygringo]

That's great, but that's not discoverability, that's searching for something you know/hope/suspect is already there.

Discoverability is about having what you can do be presented to you in the first place. It's the very opposite of looking things up. The information comes to you in a contextual way, instead of you having to go searching for it.

[themacguffinman]

So the solution is to use another separate CLI utility that you have to read the manual for, and memorize '-i' as an option for it?

[cma]

I wouldn't consider less a pure CLI utility, since it puts the terminal more into a screen mode.

[craftinator]

Same reason I stay away from text books and stick to picture books and comics! Text is boring and tedious, pictures are cute and fun!

[stnmtn]

Don't think this is a fair comparison. You can drill down quickly to learn new actions you didn't know before in a GUI. That's a whole lot harder to do in a CLI