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AtomicPurple

AtomicPurple

I created an account just to post in this thread because Ross's video made me realize why CLI is more efficient than GUI for some tasks.

I'm on Linux and prefer to use a GUI for most things, but there are a few thing that I prefer the command line, not because it's particularly fast, but because it's faster than navigating through multiple menus/folders. That's because the terminal is the only program that has a system integrated working directory model.

 

If I have some files in a folder I want to convert, I can right-click in the file manager, click open terminal here, and type the command to batch convert everything in the folder. If I use a GUI interface for the same tool, I have to click to open the program, click the open directory button, then click a bunch of times to navigate to the directory I already had open, and THEN I can start converting.

 

Dang-and-drop between windows helps with this problem, but not all programs support it (looking at you filezilla). A much better solution, I think, would be to have every program open with  the working directory set to the path of whatever file browser window is open and in focus at the time it's launched, if there is one. For example, if a flash drive open in your file browser and you launch a word processor, then clicking save would save the document directly to the flash drive. For my file conversion problem I could just open the program when I'm, browsing the files I want to convert, and hit one button, it would be way faster than CLI.

 

Of course something like this would require applications to coordinate across the entire system in a way that they currently can't/don't, and I can see lots of potential of misplaced files, so maybe make the behavior optional, and display the working file path in all window titles when it's active. I don't really know, just my two cents that maybe someone can use as inspiration.

 

AtomicPurple

AtomicPurple

I created an account just to post in this thread because Ross's video made me realize why CLI is more efficient than GUI for some tasks.

I'm on Linux and prefer to use a GUI for most things, but there are a few thing that I prefer the command line, not because it's particularly fast, but because it's faster than navigating through multiple menus/folders. That's because the terminal is the only program that has a system integrated working directory model.

If I have some files in a folder I want to convert, I can right-click in the file manager, click open terminal here, and type the command to batch convert everything in the folder. If I use a GUI interface for the same tool, I have to click to open the program, click the open directory button, then click a bunch of times to navigate to the directory I already had open, and THEN I can start converting.

Dang-and-drop between windows helps with this problem, but not all programs support it (looking at you filezilla). A much better solution, I think, would be to have every program open with  the working directory set to the path of whatever file browser window is open and in focus at the time it's launched, if there is one. For example, if a flash drive open in your file browser and you launch a word processor, then clicking save would save the document directly to the flash drive. For my file conversion problem I could just open the program when I'm, browsing the files I want to convert, and hit one button, it would be way faster than CLI.

Of course something like this would require applications to coordinate across the entire system in a way that they currently can't/don't, and I can see lots of potential of misplaced files, so maybe make the behavior optional, and display the working file path in all window titles when it's active. I don't really know, just my two cents that maybe someone can use as inspiration.

 

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