this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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A gui is helpful sometimes, but there’s a lot of cases where there’s no feasible way to make a good gui that does what the terminal can do.
Right tools for the right job.
For example, a gui to move a file from one folder to another is nice - drag and drop.
A gui that finds all files in a directory with a max depth of 2 but excludes logs and runs grep and on matching files extracts the second field of every line in the file? Please just let me write a one liner in bash
A GUI makes simple things simple.
A shell makes hard things possible.
Me fucking with hard drives/partitions : GUI please
Me doing pretty much anything else - Terminal
I always install gparted in the live environment 😂... cuz... yeah, I can fuck things up and end up without my data 😂.
Really you never organoze gigs of photos? That a gui task
Not much of a picture guy personally but I see your point.
Edit: I have spent a decent amount of time organizing books and comic books and that was a pretty even split between GUI and Terminal. GUI to get them in a state that I could bulk rename/move into appropriate directory with the Terminal. I assume it would be similar with pictures.
I spent last winter ripping all my DVDs, and I did a lot of the organizing, changing file names etc. in the terminal. Because I could automate the process even a little.
When doing TV shows, I could take the names of episodes from an online database, put those in a text file, use block edit mode and macros in Vim to format them the way I want, then use a bash command to iterate over the lines in a file and rename them all. Hell I'd probably still be at it if I had to rename that many files manually, even using copy/paste.
I have a GUI file manager that I never use but I got it because I know at some point I'm going to want to be able to see thumbnails of images.
I see a lot of people saying they have to use a GUI tool for partition management, and I’ve never understood why.
Text based tools like parted are fairly easy to use, at least compared to other terminal tools the same people are able to use for other tasks.
What is it about partitioning that needs a GUI when other tasks don’t? Is it the visual representation of the partition layout? A general fear of borking a disk?
Yes
Being able to see it helps a lot. I can and have done it via parted. My media server doesn't have a desktop environment installed. I just really would rather have a GUI when it's available as an added safeguard.
Problem nowadays is that changing partition tables is so rare that parted changes their commands between uses, and I never remember if fdisk nowadays has all the GPT related issues that made me try parted in the first place ironed out. Plus I can't remeber the new GPT commands and partition IDs.
I still mostly just read the help text every time because nothing else is installed - but from the speed I might be a bit faster with a well designed GUI nowadays if it is about modifying GPT disks. MBR disks I still can do with fdisk in my sleep.
A CLI makes simple things easy to implement.
I don't think I've ever used grep outside of a CLI.
Surely you've used something roughly equivalent like searching a text, be it web page or other document, for a word or filtering a spreadsheet?
How would one use grep for a webpage in a browser? Does the page need to be accessed outside the browser?
You should be able to use curl to get the HTML and then pipe it to grep.
Emacs grep lets you run grep, and formats the results in a buffer from where you can then easily visit the files at the match location.
Agreed 👍.