system-config-users 1.2.39 broken?

[Tim]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:29 -0600, Robin Laing 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.

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

> 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.  It's just
as hard to navigate into deeply nested trees, and even harder to keep on
changing between different directories.  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.

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).

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