[Dylan16807]

Have you ever heard of "abstraction"? People that actually use windows can handle opening the start menu as a single part of a step. There's no conscious checklist for how the UI can be customized.

If you're going to make that into a complicated mess, then you absolutely do not get to assume the user understands "add this line somewhere" or has "fleet" installed and set up the way you expect.

[winwhiz]

Yes, I think we agree that abstraction is great (with or without "scair" quotes.) My point is that CLIs are valued as tools of explication, repeatable explication. I have actually used Window since 3.1. I cherry picked a particularly juicy example that I run into a lot.

> If you're going to make that into a complicated mess, then you absolutely do not get to assume...

As far as tooling goes the GP mentioned IntelliJ so I rewrote code with fleet, I could have easily have picked emacs or vim or bash or zsh or tcsh instead of fish and the complexity of interface would have remained static. I think HN formatting tools are partly to blame for the messiness but if you look at any quality set of docs describing a complicated computer interaction, to achieve the same level of repeatability as text-based, POSIXy interactions you are going to need a lot of screen shots and a few this or thats. WHICH is fine! Remember software engineering is about trade offs!

EDIT: CLI allows for abstractions like $EDITOR and $SHELL