Comment by ZeikJT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeikJT | Hacker News Reader

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Hardly ever the case in GUI-land? That doesn't sound right at all. You can do the same kind of piecemeal work with GUIs that you do in the command line. Unless every piece of GUI software you use has a proprietary file format (which isn't unique to GUI software) it's all composable. Photos, videos, text files, etc. are all interoperable.

One contrived but possibly very common workflow for video creators: snip out a piece of a video with one tool, record new video from webcam with another, edit an image with photoshop, create sound effects in sfx util, create/record music with another, import all of the above into video editor and export a composited/rendered out video, do more lossless video compression/reduction with another utility.

Things I cannot easily compose:

- Messages (macOS)

- Slack

- web browser

- various notes apps

- iTunes

- Discord

- plenty more

These are tools I use all the time throughout the day. There is no simple pipe-like interface that allows me to easily take the output (graphical display) and pass it elsewhere to do something with it. In the terminal, everything shares a universal output system: text.

GUIs are not composable in principle. Sure, there are some workflows where you can do it, but that is not generally the case because they lack this common interface as a standard. CLI tools, on the other hand, have the standard of text output.

Except when those CLI applications happen to use curses, conio, or TTY escape codes for their output.

It is like the "Everything is a file", except when it is not.

Right, my point is that most CLI applications use text as output, versus most GUI applications do not.

Saying "Your point isn't true when there are exceptions" is a lazy argument, honestly. It is overwhelmingly the case that CLI applications use text as output, and my original point was specifically about how I wish this were more often the case with GUI applications — that you could somehow interface with them and compose them in the same way you generally can with CLI applications.

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