I recently watched the 3.5-hour workshop Mastering the curl command line by Daniel Stenberg, the author of curl
I commend the author for watching and subsequently summarizing this into a blog article, but in the age of LLMs like ChatGPT I cannot be arsed anymore to memorize any of the arcane command line arguments of curl, ffmpeg and the like.
See, I need a two hour tutorial to use the GUI because everything’s scattered all over the place. If I want to know the options for a CLI tool I just read the man page.
Until the time comes where the GUI just doesn’t have the specific option for what you want to do, and then usually you can string commands together into scripts to do it. That’s where its power lies. Every command/utility on a Unix/Linux system is meant to be a tiny building block to use to accomplish a more complex task.
You can’t possibly program an option for every contingency into a static GUI, but you can hand the user a toolbox of command line utilities and then they can accomplish nearly anything.
I commend the author for watching and subsequently summarizing this into a blog article, but in the age of LLMs like ChatGPT I cannot be arsed anymore to memorize any of the arcane command line arguments of curl, ffmpeg and the like.
One of the real turn offs to most of the people about using cli.
With gui you stumble around and make it work. With CLI you at least need a blog post read and at most need 2+hrs tutorial.
See, I need a two hour tutorial to use the GUI because everything’s scattered all over the place. If I want to know the options for a CLI tool I just read the man page.
Until the time comes where the GUI just doesn’t have the specific option for what you want to do, and then usually you can string commands together into scripts to do it. That’s where its power lies. Every command/utility on a Unix/Linux system is meant to be a tiny building block to use to accomplish a more complex task.
You can’t possibly program an option for every contingency into a static GUI, but you can hand the user a toolbox of command line utilities and then they can accomplish nearly anything.