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by xg15 41 days ago
> Pipes are not a feature. They’re a worldview.

> Text is the universal interface

No wonder we don't get better GUIs if people keep turning the terminal into a religion.

2 comments

The problem with GUIs is exactly why CLIs are preferred by many:

- GUIs keep radically changing how they look, at times even removing features, meanwhile some CLI interfaces haven't change in my lifetime

- CLIs are more often designed with synergetic effects in mind, they become part of ecosystems. Meanwhile you get the feeling many GUI applications start having a hard time saving a file to a local hard drive

- the filye types you will tend towards on a CLI are human readable and text based and can be opened in 50 years time without special vendor support

I am not that old, but the reason I like the CLI is simply because I feel GUIs come and go without improving the ecosystem they are in.

> some CLI interfaces haven't change in my lifetime

But many others have, `ps -ef` vs `ps -aux` is one example. Nowadays, most systems support both, but not so long ago you'd need to remember which one to use depending what system you were on.

The problem is that people turned "worse GUI" into a religion. We had good GUIs, but the GUI people all decided that making the GUIs worse was a brilliant thing to do