They are good for discoverability, but suck when you have to do the same thing 5 times.
-- signed, a guy currently having to use a GUI to update the firmware on 5 headsets, and put our standard settings on them
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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I CAN interact with CLI, but i WANT to interact with good GUI. I don't want to learn CLI commands when I don't have to. Especially in the cases where I use it rarely
Are you kidding? There's nothing I love more than hand typing a 400 character file path.
let's compromise with a TUI
I like tuis
Call me a hater, but TUIs are just filler for the modern wm ricer. I see new ones pop up everyday lol
rtorrent!
hater!
(but for real, I love a well-done TUI. Scriptability of CLIs is nice but sometimes the in-between of a good interface while remaining embedded in the shell works so well. Something like vifm allows me to zoom around with fzf, select things by regex or rename with vidir, move and package with rsync or tar, all without ever leaving my terminal context)
GUIs are nice. we are made for visual perception. don't feel bad about it.
often, when one sees things presented visually, such as all the files in a directory, it makes much more sense much faster than if one has to read the filenames on a console.
GUIs are actually superior for human-friendlyness in many cases, but their functionality is limited and also they can't be scripted. also it's much faster to write a CLI program than a GUI program (at least for me).
I like both, but I think I would like cli better if the syntax were more expressive, and more akin to natural human language.
The hardware of a computer is not designed to handle natural language parsing. Techbros with just enough knowledge to be dangerous will say it's a matter of complex-enough software, but it's more that human brains are not Von Neumann machines
Friend, I have studied my fair share of programming, I get it. I'm not saying there should be any significant difference to the way information is processed, or what kind of processing occurs. Just that the syntax itself trades off a little of it's brevity for a little more readability, like something along the lines of the Inform 7 but still within the boundaries of how the programs and cli normally operate under the hood.
I can appreciate the desire for "you know what I meant" CLI interaction, but shudder at the verbosity of natural language in a lot of these cases.
I think there has to be a happy medium, but I guess it depends on personal preference. It's not like brevity can't be achieved through things like aliases anyway. I just want text-based computer stuff to look a little more like something Inform 7.
I like GUIs but I also like automation. Give me a nice simple GUI but also give me a way to run from a bash shell so I can automate functions based on complex conditions and/or a schedule.
TUI
You're just describing a task scheduler.
Me too. I use a GUI for github it just easier for me. Some stuff I do like doing in the terminal.
WTF?
/s
sudo I like GUIs
The thing about CLI is that everything is hidden by default. You come to the application with your own mindset and a goal in mind and you figure out how make it do what you want.
When there's a GUI, you often see everything that's possible from the start and so the application dictates how you use it.
Though, you can do either with CLI and GUI as well. That's the sweet spot I think is the best. I love it when a CLI app guides the user through a process and gives options. And a good GUI should disable OK buttons and show validation errors if not everything is entered correctly.
In a perfect world, every app has a CLI mode, interactive and non interactive and a GUI mode with full validation and responsive UI changes. But realistically, good UX is what we need, either GUI or CLI.
Also CLI interfaces are a lot like having to know a language with the right keywords and vocabulary. Sometimes the manual doesn't always list out all the commands so it takes some trial and error to figure out. You can easily change something you didn't want to as you do.
This is one of the reasons why I can't migrate from visual studio to VS code for work. Everything is hidden beyond the weird palette search bar thingy. Just give me drop down menus and toolbars please. I'm stuck of having to remember shortcuts for things I don't do often enough to warrant it taking space up in my very limited pool of memory
Being using computers since 1992. I learned with DOS and SCO Unix.
I prefer GUIs, thank you very much.
Even when the only available option for me was Windows 3.1, I still preferred it over the CMD.
GUIs are better for poring through data as a whole, like Google docs, but CLIs are better when I want to do an operation or filter through things without looking at the thing itself, ie git or grep.
i think one difference between guis and clis that people don't think about is composability. you cant do something like "pipe the contents of a folder into vscode and do a regex find and replace" but that's what pipes let you do on the command line. with gui programs, you always have to do these things manually... which is nice the first time but then time consuming each subsequent time.
I like both the CLI and a nice GUI. Both serve a purpose for me. For example, Dolphin is quite a good GUI for going through directories and doing some file-management. Quick, easy and clear. But when I need to copy files and do some wrangling, I like the CLI.
Why not both? ROX Filer allows me to select a number of files and then apply a terminal command to all of them. I think that's really neat.
I'm the opposite when it comes to moving and copying files. I find it much easier to have two tabs or windows on a file explorer open and just do drag and drops rather than having to remember the exact path to somewhere
It depends on the complexity of the operation. "I want to rename all my files to have underscores to spaces", CLI will let you construct that easily. I want to move all mp4/mkv files to one folder, but all '.opus/.mp3' files to another folder, CLI is a bit quicker. Or I want to take the audio tracks out of all these mp4/mkv and then name the result according to the basename of the original file and move the result, well, mkvextract and mv are quicker than trying to wrangle all the content in comparable GUIs.
But yes, if you are wanting to do an operation on a file or a range of files easily handled with shift-click to select, then GUI will be both approachable and quick.
Yeah, I generally only use the CLI for moving files if I need root access to the origin or destination folders.
Ah yeah root access in dolphin is always a massive pain
As long as you don't scream the moment you see CLI, we're good :)
This is the energy we need.
New comers should never ever see or require a terminal.
Not understanding the fundamentals of the tools you use daily is not a design virtue, it just makes you less effective in using them. This cancerous philosophy leverages ignorance and laziness to support billion dollar industries of greed, slop, and censorship. It enables corrupt morons to justify surveilance and exploit weaker people. And right now, it's running blind and head first into a civilizational death trap.
It's not a design virtue because then it would have to be a design but you are talking about a... Customer fallacy...?
I set up a pi with a wide touch screen monitor, 1920 by 480. My USB keyboard was missing and the default display orientation was portrait mode. I was dreading having to go into CLI to change some fucking config. Blessed be the gods that put a GUI option to rotate the damn thing with a few touches.π
An original confession bear post? Out here in the Lemmy wilds? Excellent.
Consoles on smart phones kind of suck, mainly because on-screen keyboards are ΓΎe shittiest input meΓΎod ever devised, and even if you have a physical keypad, ΓΎe form factor isn't conducive to a good terminal experience. I've yet to see top running in a mobile terminal wiΓΎ boΓΎ a readable font size, and all columns visible.
So, GUIs are ΓΎe only reasonable option for a phone form factor.
You're using thorn for totally different sounds? Shouldn't the th in "with"/ "both" be a different letter than the TH in "the"?
Nah, not really, ΓΎ was used for both sounds throughout the history. Reviving this thing would make sense with a letter eth (Γ°), assigning one sound for each, as in "wiΓ°/boΓΎ", which is easier to read for language learners. But the person above clearly just wants to be fancy.
How I imagine people using the thorn:
Off topic: Is there a reason you are writing like that?
Is that parseltongue?
Edit: Found the character and historical meaning, but still don't understand it's contemporary use in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
If you're on android, have you tried "unexpected keyboard" from fdroid? It's waaaaaaay better than the standard ones you get, ime/o.
Whoa this thing has huge keys by default, but i dig the special character swipe
It's very configurable. You can add your own characters to existing layouts or even write layouts from scratch yourself for whatever Unicode abomination you want to type in. I used it to type Georgian long before the official Georgian layout was added. Pretty cool stuff.
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