h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This might seem a slightly redundant debate but I find myself more & more using CLI in preference to GUI so I was wondering how others felt
(If you do not understand the acronyms you are probably not qualified to contribute to this debate )

Using a CLI is nothing to be ashamed of, and vice versa (ie using a GUI is nothing shameful either). I too use a CLI very frequently indeed - much more so than I ever envisaged in the past.

The main reason for this is that I have taken a great liking to the Enlightenment window manager, which does not provide many graphical ways of launching applications. Thankfully I can touch-type at a reasonable speed and I find great pleasure in impressing people by launching terminals and typing the names of programs to launch them.

A lot of people seem to infer that using a CLI can provide you with far more functionality than a GUI, but I have never found any practical evidence for this. For example, K3B - the KDE CD burning program - is basically just a front-end for cdrecord. Now, I don't think that there is any functionality loss if I press a few buttons to burn a CD rather than type a lengthy command to cdrecord. Most people would prefer to do the former.

Technically speaking I could spend a whole day using a CLI, but I'm sure that it would make my work take a lot longer. On the plus side, it would not emit as much radiation (since most of the screen would be black), and it would probably look quite impressive to on-lookers if I knew what I was doing.

What are you getting at anyway?

Not redundant at all. The GUI just gives "easier access" to some of the more commonly used features, or those that they'd rather you used. If you want the real power the CLI is always the way to go.

It's also capable of giving a laugh or two.

$> cd /pub
$> more beer

I'm not really trying to get at anything just trying to get sounding on how people realy feel (as opposed to the pecieved wisdom). The reason, as I said I find myself using CLI more & more and also non graphical progs too (e.g. Pine for email, this post made using the "Elinks" web browser)

I see. Well I think I can say that I prefer the CLI for some things; but for others, I think a GUI is better.

"If you want the real power the CLI is always the way to go."

Why? For example, where is the increased power in typing 'tar -xvjf archive.tar.bz2' rather than right-clicking it in Konqueror and selecting 'Extract To...'?

I haven't used Pine, but I have used Links and it was very useful when I was installing Gentoo, because it was lightweight, quick to load and ideal for the LiveCD. As I say, both interfaces have their place.

I like using the CLI and find it useful, though i spend most of my time using a gui. Then again I spend quite a large amount of my time on this pc using IM, IRC, and browsing the web. If I happen to be doing something productive and editing code then I tend to have at least two differnt scripts open *is a php geek*. So switching between scripts is easier in a gui. Then again i could just open up differnt terminals.

I actully find that I open up virtual terminals and play with the CLI from the GUI while using the aformentioned IM and web browsing. I prefer using the CLI for creating directories and setting permissions to using a gui file manager because I find it more visual . I suppose its the ability to look back and follow the process line by line.


Also I have the server machine that I made up at my feet. I did that completly using CLI and that was alot of fun . Its an old Dell optiplex and the only leads going into it are the Power and network cable. When setting that up the first time I used lynx to grab the packages that I wanted for the Webserver/php/mysql. I do like the simplicity of it as a web browser, but its a pain for navigating some pages.


I also find the CLI easier to use for admin tasks for setting up users under linux. but then again I am using slackware. (Played with some otheres hated them found slackware <3. Now spend most of my time in KDE only dropping to windows to play my games.)


As mentioned above though. I can touch type, I think using the CLI is prohibative though if you can't touch type.

as for typing that line for extracting a file, hit tab, the only reason i right click and get kde to do it for me is I havn't remembered what all the flags mean.

As for the email bitty, I don't bother with setting up accounts to download my email, I jsut use webmail. Hotmail for my unimportant things and Gmail for my important things.


Hmm thats a nasty ramble that only vaugly matches the topic.

I like the CLI, I find it fun, sometimes faster that trying to rake through a menu. Though I still spend most of my time using the GUI and clicking my mouse. There is also the wow factor to anyone that is watching.

end ramble
:wq

Some interesting points What Is, I have a nice GUI for Linux but my NetBSD install is pure CLI. Now a few thoughts on what you posted;

"Then again i could just open up different terminals."
have you tried using "screen"?
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

"I actually find that I open up virtual terminals and play with the CLI from the GUI while using the aforementioned IM and web browsing"
IM & clients are available for the CLI. Centericq & Elinks are my faves.
http://thekonst.net/centericq/
http://elinks.or.cz/

"As for the email bitty, I don't bother with setting up accounts to download my email, I just use web-mail"
I have a shell account on a remote server which I can access on a local machine Pine via IMAP, if i am away from my machine I ssh or telnet into the remote server and run pine on the remote machine (the settings are the same as my local machine as I have saved them on the remote server), if no decent ssh/telnet client is available I have a web page set up with a java ssh client - if ssh it totally blocked and as a last resort I got a php web-mail script running on the remote server.

Some nice programs there.

I might take a look at them later, would be useful for those times when you want a faster boot time, so turn off the wait for the gui to start ...


At the moment I am in the stage of I have just got myself setup in linux doing everythign windows can with an even better gui. The only issue is my windows games, I can live with a windows install for that though. (Even have the windows fonts in linux now, so the windows people can get my printouts in something they recognise). Been like this for a month or so, once im over going ooh I have no need for windows (except games) (and projects where people want me to do things in M$ ACcess *cringes into ball and cries*) I'll have a play at going completly command line.

[OFF TOPIC]
re: MS Windows games on Linux have you tried WineX, this is a commercial version Wine that has been modified for better support of Direct X. One can get it free if one uses CVS
Wine http://www.winehq.com/
Winex http://www.transgaming.com/
WineX CVS http://sourceforge.net/projects/winex
[END OFF TOPIC]

[OFF TOPIC]

I have tried Wine and the derivatives, I got SOME games working, but not the one(s) that I wanted, that run using STEAM as a launching platform.(Half-life, Day of Defeat, Day of Defeat: Source). Apparently the paid for version works, however I am not gonna start paying monthly to use a game that I already own and play reguarly for nothing.

I decided that its just not worth the hassel, linux programs for linux, windows programs for windows(until I become a Billionaire, in which case of buying Caedega. Im sure valve would accept some money to make a native linux client.) Chances of me becomin a billionaire, not much, but valve may make a linux client for the next version, won't hold my breath, they already make linux dedicated servers for the game though.


Thanks for the help though.
[END OFF TOPIC]

I can't remember what CLI stands for! Does that mean I can't contribute to this discussion?

By the way, in your first post you basically say "if you don't know what these initials[1] mean you're rubbish" it would have been a lot better in my opinion to say what they meant. Just because somebody doesn't know the proper term for something it doesn't automatically follow that they don't know what it is.


[1] Technically they're not acronyms, as to be an acronym the initials have to form a proper word... oh sure people *say* Gooey when they mean GUI but that doesn't really count.

Well, as I'm a user rather than a programmer and most of the software I have to use on a day to day basis runs under windows I've no choice but to use a GUI.

However, up until we installed XP Pro on our machines (which despite my hatred of Microsoft in general I've got to admit is a darn sight stabler than their previous operating systems) I found it extremely useful to be understand DOS - just for the odd occasion when Windows 95 and 98 would crash on you and loose/corrupt files (about twice a day in our case).

CLI - the GUI is good'n'all - pretty and, in most circumstances, prefectly adequate - but if you want some of the more estoric functions of programs, or use the more oddball or even some of the diagnostic commands then the CLI is the only way to do it.

Computers are just smart enough to be dumb. The CLI allows you to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do, rather than having that decision taken out of your hands. Until later...
BCNU - Crescent

Mr. Dreadful,
Command Line Interface
Graphical User Interface

[OFF TOPIC]
"Apparently the paid for version works", *WineX* is the subsciption version and as I said providing ing get it using CVS it is Free.
[OFF TOPIC]

you only get useful things like wine using the CLI .


[offtopic]

I have had another go using the cvscedega. (there are differnces between the cvs and the paid for version.) I have actully managed to get a step further than previous attempts, though this time I did copy some files from windows once the installer died. I have hit another issue that apparently is solved by installing IE6 into the cedega. However first attempts at that were fruitless.

I really want to be windows independant which is why I tried again. I may manage it yet.

Good Luck

I have had a little play with screen (Screen actully comes with slackware as standard ), very nice.

Had a go with centericq as well, very nice for being a CLI IM client.


[OFFTOPIC]
Still don't think I will be getting any windows programs working that I want to work.

I can't actully install Ie6 properly, it just dies when I try to, I found various scripts that get Ie5.x and IE6 working, however they only do that so you can have them working to test out websites with not installed and working so as to work with other apps.

nice article on Screen over at http://thelinuxlink.net/~fingolfin/screen/

give Elinks a try - tabbed browsing, javascript support (using the mozilla JS engine "SpiderMonkey"), 16 colour support is console and 256 colour support when running in an xterm that supports 256 colour

http://happy.sdf-eu.org/temp/elinks.jpg

A screen shot of elinks with three tabs open using 256 colour mode running in an xterm