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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’d be happy with a smartphone equivalent where the differences are similar to command line tools having different syntax.

    My point was that I think we have that already. The medium is a touch screen, and apps have over time adapted to that the same way they have to the terminal. Here we scroll by swiping up and down, move between tabs by swiping to the side, etc. All held together by system-wide gesture navigation. And yea, every app does stuff differently, and so does every terminal one.

    This only furthers my point, that things could be even better using the same principles, without legacy baggage.

    I feel like this is exactly what Google was attempting to do with Material Design: a good, consistent interface / design language. It really was a fairly fresh start using what we learned from the smartphone apps that came before, with the design done intentionally. What do you think they missed?

    Another thing to keep in mind is that the terminal is built around text and files, while the GUI is not. You cant expect every problem to be cleanly / ergonomically solve-able inside an Android app, just like you cant expect a good Snapchat / Instagram client in your terminal. There are file manager apps, there are text editors, there are todo lists, but the terminal is just a better platform for some tasks while worse for others.



  • I really don’t think that the command line is a uniform interface. Every command has its own syntax, its own take on what its switches mean, its own take on regexes/globs and so on. Moving and editing files is something completely different: one is a simple command to move a file elsewhere, the other is a whole experience which replaces the command line with something that looks completely different and is controlled completely differently. What they do have in common is just the medium - the terminal.

    Many developers of command line tools try to at least keep a similar design language as the rest of the world, but it is far from perfect. A lot of these interfaces are like they are for mostly historical reasons without proper planning of the user interface, so imho even something like Material Design is already closer to being the “same interface” in the GUI world than the various command line interfaces are.

    we can’t simply reuse the command line

    We absolutely can and some of us do. I often manage my files, todo list, etc. in Termux. Its not always the best thing to do, but I like that I can keep a consistent interface no matter what device I am using. Its still the same terminal, just on a smaller screen with a worse keyboard.