I think a lot about how

1. a lot of command line UIs are kind of bad
2. building better UIs is great
3. but taking the time to get comfortable with a bad UI has often really paid off for me
4. I'll often keep using an older tool with a worse UI because it's more stable, or more actively maintained, or has more features, or has more examples available, or my friends use it
5. it's still important to acknowledge that the UI is in fact bad even if I'm pretty comfortable with it now

@b0rk I once heard something that I think about nearly once a week now:

Videogames are just bad user interfaces.

They didn't mean the games have bad GUIs. They meant that the reason games are fun is because we enjoy overcoming the challenges posed by intermediate obstacles between us and our ultimate goals. I think this explains a lot about why awkward command line UIs persist. We enjoy the process of learning them and once learned they aren't hard anymore.

@dvogel i'm not sure if I enjoy the process of learning them! i spent many years avoiding using tcpdump because I was intimidated by its UI

@b0rk i also find it very important to remember that a good command line UI can be very different from a good "interactive" UI, and some interactive programs *happen* to operate in a terminal, but that doesn't necessarily make them a "command line" program

@iximeow @b0rk the unix philosophy has a lot to answer for, huh

anyway i've been trying to summarize my relationship with git (which I love) in a single panel and this is where I landed today

@b0rk could you give an example of good command line UIs?

@Scmbradley the rust compiler? it’s a project that needs to communicate a lot of very complex information and i think does a good job

also I think tools like grep and sort are good, they’re relatively simple and don’t have a lot of gotchas that I can think of

@tef @iximeow @b0rk haha, I interpret the above to mean the opposite! The important core of the unit philosophy makes for a great UI! Tools like git stray a long way from it, and have terrible UI as a result.

Like Julia, this is basically me and git as well. I haven’t even bothered learning switch (and whatever the other new subcommand is) since it doesn’t actually address any issues I have with the tool at this point.

RE: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/112418097233853819