Re:Dijo: A terminal-based habit tracker written in Rust
by pjmlp on Thursday July 23, 2020 @08:38AM
(#23926671)
Except when those CLI applications happen to use curses, conio, or TTY escape codes for their output.
It is like the "Everything is a file", except when it is not.
Re:Dijo: A terminal-based habit tracker written in Rust
by DonaldPShimoda on Thursday July 23, 2020 @01:56PM
(#23930159)
Right, my point is that most CLI applications use text as output, versus most GUI applications do not.
Saying "Your point isn't true when there are exceptions" is a lazy argument, honestly. It is overwhelmingly the case that CLI applications use text as output, and my original point was specifically about how I wish this were more often the case with GUI applications — that you could somehow interface with them and compose them in the same way you generally can with CLI applications.
- Messages (macOS)
- Slack
- web browser
- various notes apps
- iTunes
- Discord
- plenty more
These are tools I use all the time throughout the day. There is no simple pipe-like interface that allows me to easily take the output (graphical display) and pass it elsewhere to do something with it. In the terminal, everything shares a universal output system: text.
GUIs are not composable in principle. Sure, there are some workflows where you can do it, but that is not generally the case because they lack this common interface as a standard. CLI tools, on the other hand, have the standard of text output.