----- Original Message -----
> well, and that is why there are tasks you *can * do 1000 times more
> better in a terminal or in a 3-liner shell script with one or two params
> and others where you are much faster using the GUI
>
> this world is grey
>
> hence everybody start using Linux should *know* there are terminal apps
> and which ones and make his own decision if they fit the usecase and in
> doubt be able to use both worlds
The way I view it, there are two fairly separate cases:
A) Application development (with a wide definition of an “application” as
“teaching the system to do something new”, i.e. all the way from simple aliases
and pipelines through 10-line shell scripts all the way to 10k-line shell or
Perl script monsters).
Yes, these things can’t be done in our GUIs nearly as easily, but there _really
are_ large groups of people who never will, don’t want to, or are perhaps even
forbidden from, doing such things (consider cashiers or bank tellers). So it
is quite reasonable to hide these capabilities until the user indicates some
kind of interest in developing applications (where “indicates interest” today
probably means a Google search, so we can get away with requiring one or two
non-obvious but easy to do steps to get developer access).
Also note that the shell prompt is one of the worst application development
environments still in wide use. Very weak and inconsistent programming
language, no module system, minimal auto-completion/intelligence, no inline
help, horrible debugging tools even compared to 1980s Turbo Pascal. It
_should_ be possible to have a programming environment that is vastly easier to
use than the shell prompt we have; but I have very little hope of this
improving in the medium term.
B) Application usage, interacting with applications somebody else wrote.
Here, GUIs _as a category_ (not necessarily the GUIs we are currently
providing) should always be better than CLIs _as a category_ simply because the
GUI can in the worst case just copy the CLI layout and behavior so it will not
be worse than a CLI; and then there are all the graphics and mouse interactions
and shadows and animation that a GUI can do but a CLI can’t.
So to get the best sofware system possible we should 1) actually write such
better GUIs, and 2) tell people that such better GUIs are available.
> what makes me angry is "nobody should need to use a terminal"
“Nobody should need to use a terminal” is a case of 2) above [and partially a
case of “shell is a horrible application development environment” from A)].
Note that "nobody should need to“ and “currently nobody needs to” are very
different.
And there is a major difficulty: doing 2) before 1) is done can be
counter-productive, counter-productivity or in the worst case just dishonest;
but doing 1) without 2) is likely impossible if the CLI capabilities keep
expanding faster than we can add GUI interfaces to the same capabilities. So I
can see a case for being vocal about “nobody should need to use a terminal”
even now; but that case critically depends on the ability of the community to
actually write the better non-terminal interfaces.
Mirek
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