What I like and don’t like about GUI
What I like and don’t like about GUI
We’ve been using GUIs since Windows 3.x. What do I like of it? Copy & Paste. This provides easy information exchange between applications. Multi-windows. That’s really useful. Prompting/WYSIWYG — this features makes ordinary people like GUI, because it’s too easy to use, and that’s also something that’s of less interest for people to dig in (CLI requires more thinking and is more fun). What don’t I like of it? Separated columns (such as a property sheet containing many properties). Information in different columns cannot be copied at once. They must be copied and pasted one by one. Mouse requirement: the web browser cannot be used easily without a mouse. WYSIWYG: you can’t modify invisible things easily, and sometimes modifying even visible things must also be done by hand.
How to do things efficiently in a CLI? Use a powerful text editor, such as vim. Get file lists and use vim to edit the list, and do operations on the files. Also, try to use gvim instead of vim when possible. This can let me take advantage of the multi-windows feature of GUI.