On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 21:04:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 9/2/2013 1:36 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
It's things like this "keyhole interface", that caused me to be
convinced that the GUI emperor has no clothes, and to turn to
CLI-only
development.
One of the giant failures of the GUI interface, and that VS
suffers from, too, is when you need to do repetitive operations.
On the CLI, I constantly use the history list, and I constantly
write throwaway scripts to automate what I'm doing at the
moment. It makes everything I do, no matter how obscure, only 2
or 3 keypresses.
With VS, or any GUI, if there's not a button to do it, I'm
reduced to:
move mouse
click
move mouse
click
move mouse
type
move mouse
click
type
to get something done. And if I want to do it again, I have to
repeat that process. After the 10th time, it's gaaaaahhh I hate
it and go back to the CLI.
I scan a lot of photos. I have a GUI photo editor. A common
thing I do is straighten the photos, because they never go
through the scanner straight. So it's:
right shift click on the picture
select open with
select photoeditor
select edit
select rotate
select autorotate
select apply
select save
select exit
Sounds easy, right? It is easy. Now do it to 1000 photos. With
a command line tool:
write a script that does it to one picture, name it cc.bat
do:
dir/b *.jpg >doit.bat
open the file and use the macro feature to prepend "cc " to
each file name, maybe 10 keystrokes
execute the script
Done! And CLI Clint goes and surfs the n.g. while GUI Gus has
just gotten to picture 4, only 996 more to go!
I'm not that big fan of "full" Guis either and try to stick to
slick ones.
But for fairness sake: Better Gui Programms (read: way too few)
have Macro facilities.
(My major reason to go GUI for programming is the auto*
/configure/m4/makefile mess. Having that handled by some build in
magic is cool. Which, if I'm not mistaken is less of an issue
with D (dub, etc?))
A+ -R
