The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)

Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by ergothus on Monday December 10, 2018 @01:59PM (#18650267)

I like your viewpoint, but my experience with GUIs was largely that THEY hid power...from me. Any setting that could only be managed from within a GUI meant automation was pretty much off the table (and by "automation" I mean any basic connection of two tasks, things joe average user would want, not necessarily heavy industrial automation). Remember when Windows NT had only a binary event log, and their graphical client was the only way to view it?

I think the issue is not so much "command line hides power and treats GUI like a second-class citizen", though that is true, but rather that preferring one over the other creates problems.

This issue is again rearing its head in website design - many "web applications" have states that are not reachable via linking.

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Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by derefr on Friday December 14, 2018 @03:54PM (#18684653)

Back before the Unix-ization of macOS, there was a large focus on programs providing accessibility/automation APIs. The GUI parts of macOS were actually far more scriptable back in the OS7-9 days (and early OSX days) than they are today. It used to be that any effect you wanted to trigger in the OS, you could do by sending an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_event through the OSA scripting component to the relevant system service.

Nowadays on macOS, with the availability of the CLI, Apple engineers have decided to expose those same effects through CLI utilities that call directly into private system APIs (which are themselves usually client libraries for private Mach client-server ABIs.) If there's a switch exposed in the GUI but not the CLI, it's unlikely there's an event to reach it any more.

(Though, in macOS or Windows or Linux, it's always a possibility to write a script that has GUI effects directly in terms of "click the first button on the right"-style accessibility directions. But that's extremely brittle to system version updates, and precisely the thing that exposing an automation API is meant to avoid.)

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Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by pseudalopex on Monday December 10, 2018 @03:51PM (#18651075)

Most applications focus on either the GUI or the CLI because building two complete interfaces takes a lot of work.

You're right that a lot of GUIs aren't designed for automation, but CLIs aren't the only answer. Classic MacOS had a powerful scripting architecture. (It still exists, but it's been neglected.)

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