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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I actually kinda agree with this.

    Even if a commandline tool has more power, utility and flexibility than a gui tool, guis let you drill down into the core workflow of what your software is meant to do. At a minimum, it lets you segment what your regular users are expected to do from what your power users could use your software to do.

    Additionally, if you intend for your software to be used by non-software adjacent users, a commandline interface is just asking for people to get lost/confused.

    At work, we use ROS on some of our systems and while the commandline tools are simple to someone who works in the ecosystem, knowing what to look at when things go wrong is tricky.

    Even a simple gui in tkinter that shows statuses or shows a list of topics and lets you print them out is leagues above the commandline when it comes to how much I need to be involved in other peoples’ problems.

    It is a luxury to be knowledgeable in software concepts and I think software devs/power users forget that often.