[PLUG] Scripts vs GUI

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Sun Dec 11 17:51:14 UTC 2016


On 12/10/2016 10:15 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> ...
> The power of Unix/Linux is that shell scripts can automate
> what you do frequently.  
> ...

On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 01:21:21AM -0800, King Beowulf wrote:
> ...
> Often a properly designed GUI is quicker and more intuitive that trying
> to remember and track obscure CLI options stuffed into a script
> somewhere.  
> ...

If you reread what I wrote, it is about making your
own SHELL SCRIPTS for frequently used tasks.  You
can connect to your scripts with the command line,
or you can add a desktop icon, or add an icon to
the Gnome/KDE menu.  CREATE and AUTOMATE.

There are tools for capturing and automating mouse
clicks.  But your desktop icons can move around,
so that is very fragile. 

Rich mentions LyX for working with LaTeX, which I have
tried using.  Too inflexible, too much work to iterate
towards what I want, too subject to the changing whims
of GUI re-designers.  My documents are built out of
segments of other documents, dozens of interations,
often with other tools (like povray) making some of
the elements of the complete document.  Concatenating
documents with shell scripts is easier after iteration
two, and vital on a tight deadline.

My dear wife uses the desktop and GUI far more than I
do;  the icons and documents are piled on top of each
other on her desktop, and she cannot find anything. 
Her desktop has meeting minutes from two years ago,
but she can't use grep to locate what she worked on
last month.  With grep and text sources, I can find
meeting minutes from 20 years ago;  more specifically, 
a document in a specific two week time window 20
years ago - on half a dozen machines, with different
distro versions.

If I put that search in a script, with a few comments,
I can use it again in the future.  I can rewrite it to
look for another time window, without needing to
remember how to use rarely used grep options.  When I
have many such scripts, I can use grep to find them.

Simple shell programming (with comments!) is an
investment in the future.  Some people "organize" their
information and tasks like they have no future.  They
work like blue collar assembly line workers, repeating
the same manual operations over and over until they get
old and they can't hold their hands steady any more. 
Or programmers replace them with a robot.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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