[emodendroket]

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

[flohofwoe]

UI discoverability has massively declined with the advent of touch UIs though. You can't hover a UI item to see what it does, and there's a lot of non-intuitive "magic swipes" and hidden UI elements in smartphone UIs which you just have to know about.

[zozbot234]

Touch UI items tend to be larger by necessity (and to have surrounding padding as a safety factor, which increases their "effective" size even further), so you don't really need to do the hover thing. Just redesign them to be more self-explanatory as opposed to wasting that space.

"Magic swipes" could also be redesigned to be more intuitive, e.g. with some background soft-3D effects that make swipe-sensitive areas "stand out" from the neutral background.

[emodendroket]

Aren't magic swipes basically the analog to keyboard shortcuts?

[KineticLensman]

Keyboard shortcuts were usually accelerators for easily discoverable menu items. Magic swipes don’t usually have the equivalent of a menu that can be used if you don’t know the swipe

[sixstringtheory]

Your argument applies to all kitchen sinks, regardless of whether they are considered one application like VSCode or an operating system withs collection of applications like Unix. Both still have all the capabilities for text editing, syntax highlighting, version control and executing scripts. You can spread complexity around in different ways but you can’t eliminate it.

Personally I find GUI discoverability to be like the hunt-and-peck model of typing, vs touch typing being CLI, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that touch typing and CLI go hand in hand: you never leave home row. You think about what you want to do and type the command, instead of looking through panels of icons or more exotically arranged buttons (which in the newest web apps, constantly jump around as the page lazily loads, new elements appear forcing layout changes, fonts load causing text reflow… I frequently tap the wrong menu item because what I really wanted got pushed down by a new appearing element as my finger approached the screen.)

[emodendroket]

Maybe with something like PowerShell, with very consistent command names and arguments, this model is believable, but I don't know what other than memorization is going to tell you that "less" is for reading a file and "dd" is for copying one disk to another.

[vladvasiliu]

I agree with you about discoverability, but in practice I find that tasks aren't completely new every time, there usually are common principles. With usage, you kinda get to know what is and isn't possible, even if you don't recall the precise details of each and every command. So you can look them up, knowing more or less what you're looking for.

On Linux, `--help` usually... helps. Or there's the man. On Windows, the MS docs are usually usable to find things.

Of course, it may not work 100% of the time, but I find it's a question of philosophy. I'm not a Windows user, so I generally approach it with a mentality of "it would be nice to be able to do this, let me check real quick if there's a way". I usually manage to not have to click around for two hours when I have to do something repetitive.

[emodendroket]

Hm, well, part of the problem is, what man page are you even looking for? You already have to at least know the command you want. Honestly I usually end up resolving my queries with Google instead.

[eecc]

Uh no.

Take clicking around a Microsoft ISS configuration on Windows 2000 vs an Apache httpd config file and it’s online doc.

I briefly tried both, and didn’t look back

[emodendroket]

For a task like configuring a Web server you're right. But do you think most tasks people do on a computer are like that? I don't think that they are.

[giovannibonetti]

I think I saw a command line tool that would show the documentation for all flags when you pressed tab... I don't remember it's name, though.