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by DonaldPShimoda 2152 days ago
Things I cannot easily compose:

- Messages (macOS)

- Slack

- web browser

- various notes apps

- iTunes

- Discord

- plenty more

These are tools I use all the time throughout the day. There is no simple pipe-like interface that allows me to easily take the output (graphical display) and pass it elsewhere to do something with it. In the terminal, everything shares a universal output system: text.

GUIs are not composable in principle. Sure, there are some workflows where you can do it, but that is not generally the case because they lack this common interface as a standard. CLI tools, on the other hand, have the standard of text output.
1 comments
pjmlp 2151 days ago
Except when those CLI applications happen to use curses, conio, or TTY escape codes for their output.

It is like the "Everything is a file", except when it is not.

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DonaldPShimoda 2151 days ago
Right, my point is that most CLI applications use text as output, versus most GUI applications do not.

Saying "Your point isn't true when there are exceptions" is a lazy argument, honestly. It is overwhelmingly the case that CLI applications use text as output, and my original point was specifically about how I wish this were more often the case with GUI applications — that you could somehow interface with them and compose them in the same way you generally can with CLI applications.

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