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by brailsafe 637 days ago
I don't necessarily want docker containers running locally as some hobbyist, they might be just part of the process, and if the gui helps me move through that process efficiently without having to add more commands to my memory, I'm happy about that. CLIs are great, but when nearly everything has one, those small amount of commands become quite a lot in aggregate.
1 comments

there are ways to minimize memorization, most important:

1. keep log, docs, records of whatever you are doing. most commands are repetitive.

2. copilot or chatgpt, they help a lot with command lines and simple utilities

3. amazon Q sucks in comparison.

4. it used to be google, but now LLMs do it better. less scrolling and ads/spam.

Yes, either all that above or just GUI for rare occasions.
yes, when it's possible. but guis may not exist or may be not better than console, like in case of ffmpeg. the best, of course, is smart assistant who can take verbal commands. either human or llm.

but my post was about doing complex tasks in general. try to offload. another advise for developers is to write comments, even in your small hobby projects. this way you don't have to memorize it all. this was learned hard way. i usually also have a separate documentation with plans, ideas, algorithms, useful info. remind: this is for hobby projects.

and important thing: touch typing is must have. this makes it all much easier

I do think these are good suggestions for anyone getting started with CLIs. Initially they struck me as a bit redundant, but only because the point I meant to make was that because I've already been doing most of that for ages, I'm happy to delegate that to a good gui if one comes along, since that is both more enjoyable, less error prone (mostly), and less tedious. Notes, comments, and LLM generated commands are lovely, but needing to rely on them less, particularly in situations where you can perform some common subset of tasks with better information layout, interface, and progress/state feedback, is worth paying for sometimes.

FFMpeg is a good example though of one I'm happy to just have my notes on, but since I do literally only ever use it for one or two types of tasks, I'm happy to have that sit behind the scenes. Others might use it in many versatile ways, for which I'd be grateful to have those options readily available in my terminal.

Life is full of many things to do and so not everyone have the luxury to priorities logging ones life for everything they do. 2 or GUI are very feasible option for busy people.
you don't have to "prioritize logging" to have logs, calling this a "luxury" is quite bizarre. You can simply use tools that do bash history search, or one of the many copy-paste memorizer tools, and you'll save many hours out of those "many things to do" simply by typing ctrl+s. Some people are busy simply because they want to.
My preferred solution is to have a GUI, then I don't need to do anything extra to remember CLI commands.