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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 27th, 2024

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  • The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.

    I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It’s muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.

    And then there’s the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there’s options that you just kinda have to know. There’s -h or --help, then there’s the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it’ll be faster to just search online.

    All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there’s a line showing ‘ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]’. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they’re actually doing as they’re using the GUI