From kragen@dnaco.net Wed Sep 9 11:15:11 1998 Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 11:15:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: Michael LaMorte Subject: Re: How Stella Got Her i mac In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1746 Status: O X-Status: On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Kragen wrote: > On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Michael LaMorte wrote: > > I've used CLI's before: ProDOS (Apple II WAY back in the day...), DOS, > > HP/UX... > > I can't see any possible reason -- other than writing scripts -- that > you'd want to use CLIs in ProDOS or DOS. And most of the stuff I do > with CLIs in Linux would probably be easier to do in a Mac-like GUI. Here are some things that I've done in CLIs in the last month or two that are more difficult to do in a Mac-like GUI. - compared a tape to a compressed file, given only a tool to read the tape, a tool to uncompress the file, and a tool to compare two streams. dd if=/dev/rmt/0 ibs=10k | cmp - <(gzip -dc tape-image.gz) (Of course, you could write a special-purpose GUI tool to compare a tape to a compressed file, and it would be easier to use. But you can't write tools with the Mac's GUI -- you have to resort to C or Pascal or something.) - Found out how many unique IP addresses or domain names had accessed my web pages in the last month, and browsed them: awk '{print $1}' < acclog/access_log.199808 | sort -u | less - Invoked the 'cvs add' command on every file in a directory tree: find dirname -exec cvs add {} \; - Packaged up most of the aforementioned actions into canned scripts. - Specified actions to be executed in the future on files that don't exist yet. Have you read the Anti-Mac paper yet? It's a very good paper, written by two well-known Mac fans who are prominent in the software usability field. (It's at .) By the way, I certainly don't think that GUIs are incapable of doing the things I've listed above. I've done similar things with Khoros's GUI, for example. But the GUI built into the MacOS is limited to doing only nine things: - displaying on-off one-bit pieces of information - displaying one-of-several choices - displaying scalar values - displaying text - allowing the user to input on-off one-bit pieces of information - allowing the user to input one-of-several choices - allowing the user to input scalar values - allowing the user to input text - allowing the user to invoke commands by selecting buttons or menu items It's better at all of these things, except for displaying and inputting text, than any CLI is or can be. (To be fair, there's another thing that GUIs are infinitely better at than CLIs: editing images. I've used AutoCAD's CLI, though, because I needed to specify things that were not possible to specify using the lousy GUI it had at the time.) The trouble is, when it comes to more complicated things, the Mac resorts to text. Do you understand why I sometimes use CLIs rather than GUIs? Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker I don't do .INI, .BAT, .DLL or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files. I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby. -- Fritz Anderson