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Discussion on: On GUI-shaming and a mountain of hot takes

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Raunak Ramakrishnan

At the end of the day, GUIs and CLIs are just that - interfaces to accomplish your tasks. I'll use the best tool for the job. A lot of people hate on GUIs but there are many poorly designed CLIs as well.

For a beginner, GUIs can be better mainly for 2 reasons:

  • discoverability - GUIs show possible tasks through menus. Many also come with a useful Help menu. Beginners are unaware of many possible use-cases of a tool. Getting help in the command-line is non-obvious to beginners.
  • familiarity - Familiarity with existing software you may have used e.g browsers, file managers, Word/Excel etc. This makes GUIs less off-putting to beginners who may otherwise be daunted by the learn curve.

As people in this thread have mentioned, power-users like CLIs because of the scope for automation and composability.

A problem with GUIs is the fear of a software update removing/re-organizing your familiar menu/sub-menus or even worse, some wholesale design change like those Material Redesigns which seem to change the UI/UX just for the heck of it.