system-config-users 1.2.39 broken?

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 12:35, Tim wrote:

> > In my experience the GUI is a major headache for many tasks.  It is 
> > slow and cumbersome.  Many times in a week I have to change file names 
> > or organize data files.  I can do this in CLI in seconds.  In the GUI 
> > it take hours.  Moving 200 grouped, non-sorted files from one 
> > directory to another is a simple command in the CLI.  In the GUI it 
> > takes a bunch of pointing and clicking.
> 
> In the CLI it takes a lot of typing, changing paths, typing in new
> names, working out the syntax for your wildcarding/renaming rules.

But, when doing it interactively, you have path completion and wildcards
available.  When doing it repeatedly, you just save the command
regardless of the complexity.

> With a GUI there are wildcarding/batch selection tools, tools which take
> much of the headache out of remembering the syntax. 

Sometimes, in some GUI's.  And if they use a different syntax that makes
it harder, not easier to remember. 

> A little bit of
> pointing and clicking makes it easy to shift 200 JPEGs from one place to
> another and rename them according to a pattern, for instance.

Or, with a mouse-wiggle you can accidentally duplicate your whole
directory tree... At least with the CLI you can pause before you
hit enter to make sure the command is correct.

> > Changing directories is also a pain in most GUI's that I have used. 
> > Especially when there are deep tree's.  Also editing files is much 
> > quicker from a CLI than a GUI.  In a term window type in ghex2 
> > {path}/{filename} and it opens.  In the GUI, open application, click 
> > through all the various folders to get to the correct file and open.
> 
> Again, in the CLI you've got to type out the new filepaths. 

Or use file/path completion.  Or history recall if you have done
it recently.

> It's just
> as hard to navigate into deeply nested trees,

But you often don't _have_ to navigate there to access something.

> and even harder to keep on
> changing between different directories.

What?? Pushd/popd; cd -;  And, you don't have to "be" there to
access or move files.

> And when it comes to editing
> files, I find a windowed editor much easier to quickly scroll through,
> scanning the content with my eyes, and adjusting what I want where I
> want, rather than paging through in a TUI.

In a text-mode text editor, you normally use commands to navigate, like
/text<enter> instead of visually scanning.  It's obviously faster in
a large document, but once you are used to it, it is also faster than
moving your hand to the mouse even to move a few lines or words over.

> The common argument that CLI is superior to *the* GUI seems to hinge on
> arguing that the CLI is superior to some *particular* crap GUIs that the
> person has to put up with.  When it comes to file management, I'm yet to
> find anything that makes things easier than using Directory Opus
> (whether that be the Amiga or PC version, and I don't mean the
> two-window pane thing it was at version 4).

It's partly a matter of scale.  There's a point where GUI operations
just take to long to build their iconic representations and the result
is not particularly useful because of the visual clutter.  Suppose you
want to copy some arbitrary file to some arbitrary location in a tree
of many thousands of files and directories, and you already know their
names (which is likely if some GUI mechanism hasn't been hiding them
from you).  How is scanning though the thousands of things you don't
want to see going to help access the one you already know you want?

On the other hand, if you are not doing anything new and the GUI
designer has built a simple interface for everything you will ever
attempt with your combination of programs I can see that you might
prefer it.   It just hasn't happened that way for me yet.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com