i mean… you can also just look around and see the guy with the dorky out-of-place classes…

User is not in the pleaser file. This incident will be reported.

i always do “read;rm ./file” which gives me a second to confirm and also makes it so i don’t accidentally execute it out of my bash history with control-r

that could be it… I’ve just thought about it a lot and came up with a new theory.

it seems to me that the limitations of screen real estate seem surmountable. eg: a settings menu could have a search bar like in android, meaning your options can be accessible even though they’re buried in the gui. then, your settings could be “stable” and repeatable by adding flags like in google chrome (another gui program).

you can actually use chrome from a cli with selenium or the headless command (–headless) and I’ve used this to scrape websites locked behind Javascript. but average chrome users don’t demand the further development of these features.

yes, great example. also: when the creators of that program decide the want to redesign the ui, all of your tutorials on how to do things break.

my theory is that its not something inherent about using text instead of graphics: a maintainer of a cli program could also decide that they want to redesign the command line options. but its more that users of guis don’t demand stability or repeatability. they are impressed by a ui redesign and so that’s what they get.

i think one difference between guis and clis that people don’t think about is composability. you cant do something like “pipe the contents of a folder into vscode and do a regex find and replace” but that’s what pipes let you do on the command line. with gui programs, you always have to do these things manually… which is nice the first time but then time consuming each subsequent time.

destroying books seems like a pretty tame problem to me when other companies are doing things like starting wars, getting people addicted to drugs, or destroying our democracy.