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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

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This is why people find nerds irritating. No one is forcing you to use anything you don’t want to. I use the CLI too, and I’m an Emacs fan, just about the opposite of trendy-flashy. But those of us who also like GUIs for the things they’re good at are interested in making them better.

I believe most objections to GUIs come from people who've never experienced good mouse control. If you're not using a high-end gaming mouse and a high refresh rate monitor, with sensitivity/acceleration curve selected with careful thought, on a mouse pad that suits your settings, you probably have bad mouse control.

Watch some videos of top-ranking aim trainer players so see how high the human skill ceiling is for mouse control, and look at the hardware they're using.

You and OP are both conflating GUIs with mouse control. GUIs are great, sure, but aren't necessarily mouse-driven. I'm not using the mouse most of the time in my GUIs.

(also are you suggesting becoming a e-sports tier performer to be... fast in executing actions on your computer? Think about how absurd it sounds. Mouse clicking on UI elements requires visual feedback and a lot more conscious effort where keyboard is just muscle memory and is vastly simpler for most discrete actions, except for a few scenarios, while being blazingly fast. Yes I'm more than aware what aim trainers are, and high-end mice are not more special than high-end keyboards. Aim trainers have completely different constraints and requirements than UIs.)

Esports training is about beating the competition, so you have to chase every last improvement possible, and there are diminishing returns. For ordinary GUI use you can compromise on 99% performance with much less effort. This is still more effort than most computer users put in, but it's hardly anything compared to what professional musicians or athletes have to do. There's nothing absurd about it.

As an example of a compromise you could make, in many games, mouse acceleration has higher skill ceiling than linear mouse control. But mouse acceleration it's harder to learn, and the possible performance improvement is only small. I disable mouse acceleration myself because I'm not aiming to win tournaments. IMO, linear mouse control should be the default.

And I do not experience any conscious effort when using a mouse. My subjective experience is I look at a target and the cursor appears there automatically. The better the hardware you're using the easier it is to achieve this.

I suspect that is a huge factor, indeed. I often see people using bad mice, with uncomfortable shape, bad buttons, bad sensitivity plus often acceleration enabled. Then on top of that, people are putting mouse in some weird locations, like a narrow slit shelf, or far away from the keyboard (because they have a bad sensitivity configured in part). Or even no mouse and just use trackpad (even the superb one like in Macbooks). Of course GUI would feel clunky that way.

If you’re not gaming, what do you need a mouse for?

The nail gun is also a GUI. The oven mitt is Gnome 3. The CLI in the example is the arbitrary force applicator that lets you dial in force, duration and direction for each shot - a bit like a welding machine, I suppose. You use the nail gun because it does the thing you want - press lever, get nail. You don't use the oven mitt because it doesn't do what you want. You don't use the arbitrary force applicator because it's too fiddly. Some people swear by the control it gives them, but most people just want a thing that shoots nails. This is why you use vim/emacs (which are GUIs) and you don't use ed.

> Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not)

1. Carpenters are often women who like wearing skirts at work 2. Many carpenters are Scottish and prefer to dress traditionally 3. Carpentry is incredibly progressive career where many men wear skirts to work 4. Carpenters regardless of gender like to work nude

No, wait, I get it now 5. Carpenters let their trousers hang, resulting in the cleavage of their buttocks showing when they reach over.

Damn, I was getting exited over male carpenters wearing skirts to work.

Do you hold your phone to the same standard and do everything from Termux there? Or the GUI disdain is reserved strictly to the PCs?

Smartphone UIs are a devastating blow to humankind. They make a real computer just redundant enough that people buy smartphones instead of computers and then just don't do anything that can't be easily done on a smartphone. Furthermore, as doing anything productive is so painful on smartphones, people just passively consume stuff instead.

Well, smartphone was more for an example. My main point was to highlight the absurdity of the summarily dismissing a PC GUI by the top poster. CLI is great, sure, but it's not a means to the end for me at least.

In rare cases, even the "CLI native" tasks are easier to do in GUI, like for example sifting through a really big log dumps with long lines, or configuring a really long configuration file, or editing a giant nested JSON.

Even a basic shell prompt is better done as a GUI so that background job output doesn't interfere with the next command you type. Heck, you could even have one window per job, or tabs.

> Smartphone UIs are a devastating blow to humankind.

This, right here, is EXACTLY why the general public has a big “eeeeeeeeh nah” reaction to anything Linux and actually prefer mobile UIs. Your elitist “ehrmahgehrd GUIs are for dumbstersss learn to use a terminal you newb” just shows you are completely out of touch with reality, and worse than that, you seem to wear that as some sort of badge of honour “I’m such a greybeard, a true wizard of computing”.

Get over yourself, man.

I remembered an Emacs skit :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

My phone conveniently integrates the functionality of an emergency communication device with the old calculator watch I used to have. That's about the limit of what the hardware form factor can do without it being an absolutely miserable experience. I don't do real computing on a touch screen.

If graphical interfaces are so useless to you, what are you doing in a thread about graphical interfaces?

People use computers for other stuff than coding. And for most of those workflows a command line doesn't serve.

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