Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

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Debuggers. A GUI debugger can show you a watch window with some variables and you can see it change in real time as you step through code, without you having to explicitly run the print command on each step for each variable, and without leaving a mess of historical values on your screen. Thanks to that, observing state as it changes costs less effort. Instead of manually asking all the time, you passively observe. It means greater productivity for the user of the debugger. And it goes beyond the watch window: source preview, disassembly, registers, hexdump of memory…

And obviously: editors. Unless you’re using ed, everybody’s using GUI or TUI editors. And TUI is just a poor man’s GUI. All the benefits of CLIs are gone, while the things GUIs are good at are degraded.

Not to mention anything related to graphics, photography, video…

I think what we need is unix/shell-like GUI.

CLIs all have the same consistent user interface. Positional arguments, flags, and text output. On unix-like envs they also have pipes. This is why people like them. This is what makes people productive in them.

Sure, modern GUIs have a few shared UX paradigms, but largely they are all different.

I wonder how the unix philosophy applies to GUIs? Or what the early developers thought about it. How would piping work in a GUI.

You might find Rio interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system)

There was a GUI at some point - in an old rarely used OS - that allowed you to use point and click to connect the output of one text box into a form field.

Found it. Doesn't work quite how I expected it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(software)#Pipelines_...

Debugger is also an interesting example. In IntelliJ, when using the debugger I've often use the command line interface too. Sometimes I have been debugging something and I wished I could use a Node.js script to automate some stuff. Or I wished I could pipe the output through a Node script. The way the debugger is implemented in IntelliJ makes this a little difficult. Certainly not as easy as piping. I think this is because it uses the gdb machine-interface API which is different to the text command one.

For source control, IntelliJ does actually print all the git commands it is running which is nice.

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