Explicating the survival of the Shell as default OSS UI

boomzilla

And it actually works the way I told it to, unlike the other program's GUI.

CLI PRIVILEGE

You should feel ashamed.

blakeyrat

To actually load the libraries in question, Java uses the classpath and .NET uses the References system.

I can't speak for Java, but C# also has an optimizing compiler, so if you really want to "remove the boilerplate" you could simply include literally every reference in literally every C# class (make a template and have the IDE do it), and let the compiler optimize 95% of them away.

The "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" method of includes.

blakeyrat

@ben_lubar said:

And it actually works the way I told it to, unlike the other program's GUI.

Is there a point you were getting at here, other than "bad software is bad"?

Or maybe "all software under the Windows Live brand is complete and utter shit" which, BTW, I 100% agree with.

ben_lubar

Can you suggest a free video editor that works on Windows that isn't complete and utter shit?

blakeyrat

No. Because video editors are hard to build and therefore aren't generally free. There aren't any worthwhile free ones on Linux either.

You could try Lightworks?

mott555

I briefly had NCH Software's VideoPad but it wasn't free. It was actually pretty easy to use, except just a couple months after I purchased a license for nearly $90 they released a new version, expired my license AND my installed software, and expected me to pay full-price for the upgrade. Homey don't play that.

Not that that answers any of your questions....I guess as a warning don't get VideoPad unless you like wasting money.

ben_lubar

Dwarf Fortress took 12 years (and counting) to build, but it's free. Digital books cost $0 to manufacture, but they usually cost more than physical books. Hardness-to-build and cost are not related.

blakeyrat

No, Dwarf Fortress is like that machine in The Princess Bride and it sucks years off your life and basically it all totals up.

ben_lubar

Well, Discourse is free and it certainly isn't easy to build or they would have done it right.

Arantor

@ben_lubar said:

Dwarf Fortress took 12 years (and counting) to build, but it's free. Digital books cost $0 to manufacture, but they usually cost more than physical books. Hardness-to-build and cost are not related.

In this country there's a reason for that; physical books attract a 0% VAT rate, but e-books are not considered under the 'essentials' category and therefore attract the standard 20% VAT rate.

Arantor

Does that mean Jeff is really Count Rugen in disguise?

WTF does that make you, the Man in Black?

Yamikuronue

I had a project underway once to write an intuitive GUI for video editing.
It would have just been a GUI wrapper for ffmpeg because ffmpeg does everything already way better than any video editing software, but I wanted a nice GUI for it.

blakeyrat

What kind of product research did you do? Because Sony Vegas isn't even the top in the field, and it blows ffmpeg away at everything including rendering speed.

Yamikuronue

I didn't try Vegas. I did try a number of products, but somehow missed that one. Is it any good? I'm still looking for a good one.

Is their Movie Studio good for entry-level?

blakeyrat

It's the best you can get in the $80 range. I've had people tell me Premiere is worth the price, but honestly at this point if I did upgrade I'd just buy the full Vegas package. (Which is definitely priced to compete with Premiere, I assume it competes on features, too.)

ben_lubar

I felt like doing that too, but I never got around to starting.

Which is unusual for me, since I usually start every project I think of and just never get anywhere with them.

bp_

I spent too much time writing this not to post it so here goes nothing

@KillaCoder said:

Because the people developing those programs are all already experts on CLI and see no reason why they should move away? Users should "just learn".

You do realize that no one is born an expert on CLI, right? Most CLI users actually do not hail from Bashistan. Most people that do have learned the hard way after fucking around a little with their Linux live CD. Other people just say "I'm a software developer and what is this shit. Go away from my life forever."

Why do people use Google? Wouldn't it be easier to have a single page that links to every web site ever? Surely you've heard about web directories — from history books, mainly. Google is the quintessential command line interface: you tell it what to do, and it does it for you. No one has trouble using it. Almost everybody who doesn't have much of a clue about the internet knows enough to type "facebook" in Google to get to the Facebook page. Oh, and that command line does actual commands, too — using voice and an Android device you can use that very same interface to search you can set reminders, create appointments, text people, whatever. There's no button or UI for it. You just issue the command.

I like the Linux CLI enough to have it installed on Windows. Here's the fish shell in all of its glory. For bonus points, I have the git command line interface installed. Can it get even more heretic than this?

http://i.imgur.com/7nlhld1.png

A CLI comes with features that are simply impossible to do on GUI:

Command autocompletion, so you don't have to use the -f/-F short options that people here like to whine so much about
Recalling and searching past commands, so that once you get the short option right, you don't have to do that again twice
Aliases: still feel really scared by that short option? Alias it away! Creating git-reset-and-lose-my-unstaged-changes to call git reset --hard is trivial, and you don't even have to type in all of that every time you want to use it.
Robust homogeneous automation. This is huge. If you find yourself issuing the same commands over and over, you can just stick them in a file and call that instead.

Let me illustrate:

Let's say you have to infrequently disable a couple of Linux features on a local machine for debugging purposes. You google around and run these commands:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/oom-kill
swapoff -a

You do lose the effects on reboot however. Instead of googling the result every time you want them gone, you just write this in a file:

#!/bin/bash
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/oom-kill
swapoff -a

You mark this as executable and then run this file instead of the two commands individually.

Say, however, that you want this on every reboot. You drop this very same script into whatever folder is appropriate for your distribution (e.g. /etc/init.d/rc.local) and that's it. If you want to do this on a thousand computers, you just distribute this file in the same folder on each machine with whatever mechanism is cool today.

All you needed to do is Google a little.

Now say you want to disable paging on Windows (hey, that's roughly as good an idea as running those two commands above). You know that you can simply do that through Control Panel → System → Advanced System Settings → (Yes, UAC, I want this) → Settings... (the first from the top) → Advanced → Change → Select system disk → No paging file → Set → Ok → Ok → Ok → Close control panel. (Let's ignore the case where you might have multiple swap files on multiple disks)

Okay; now do that on all machines in your domain. The equivalent here is going through the 14 click long rigmarole on every single machine you have. The alternative is learning an entirely new paradigm, assuming whatever automation APIs Windows may make available even allow this kind of change. Of course: when you have multiple ways of doing things, chances are they won't all expose the same set of features. Soon you have things you can only do clicking and things you can only do from the command line.

In the CLI, the automation interface is the same as the normal interface. This means that automating menial tasks becomes almost second nature. If your interface is command-line-first, automation becomes that much more powerful, let alone natural. You can use and install simpler GUI interfaces if you really want to, but those are a separate concern, a different task from the program's actual business logic. Blakeyrat puts it best:

@blakeyrat said:

"Here's the deal: to get Apple Certified, which still matters because it's 1992 and that's how you get into Egghead Software and Computer City, you gotta implement at least the 4 required AppleEvents: Open, Save, Print, Quit. Oh, and, BTW, since you gotta implement the AppleEvent handling code anyway, you'd save time just having your native GUI send AppleEvents to itself."

Replace all the Apple* stuff with the CLI and enforcement through certification with enforcement through having the GUI in its own separate optional program anyway.

This also results in less bugs: git cannot hang its interface by running code in the UI thread if it doesn't have a UI thread in the first place. Since all UI interfaces all interact with git through the public command line interface, you enforce the kind of separation between view and model/controller that is universally recognized to be a good idea in software. This also means that the GUI interface is a full subset of the CLI: anything the GUI does, the CLI can automate.

Does that mean that any user interface can possibly expose all features available through git's 34+ subcommands and options thereof? No! And that's okay.

There is no way to make NTFS junctions from the built-in Windows user interface; you have to either get a third-party GUI program or drop to the command line. Does this bother anybody? No. Is mklink any less complete for not having a GUI? No. What's the GUI equivalent of vol? Where in the Windows interface is the Volume Serial Number shown? Is Windows incomplete for not having this? Doesn't Windows have customers with needs?! I DEMAND A FULL REFUND.

So yeah, sometimes you do have to drop to the command line and use copy paste (oh the horror! how will people ever figure this one out!) stuff in a terminal to get one-off setup and tweaks done. Does that mean that Linux is incomplete or defective? No. Just paste the command you've been given for free in and be thankful, for Pete's sake.

@blakeyrat said:

This goes back to my complaints about developers writing software before educating themselves on what came before. The reason the state of the art never advances is because there's no "standing on the shoulder of giants" in our field, at all.

You literally can't stand on wider, taller shoulders than Unix.

@blakeyrat said:

> AFAICT, he insists that there should be no difference between developers and end users, because everyone should be able to be a developer.

Yes, but what people here on this forum don't get is that that's the ideal.

The first step to making software development so hard to be inaccessible is having to relearn everything about how to use a computer just so it fits in a text file.

I stopped reading this thread at about post 130 or so. Surely that's not a problem right? The internet is write-only anyway.

blakeyrat

I'm not going to reply to your whole post, but.