On 9/2/2013 1:36 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:

It's things like this "keyhole interface", that caused me to be
convinced that the GUI emperor has no clothes, and to turn to CLI-only
development.

One of the giant failures of the GUI interface, and that VS suffers from, too, is when you need to do repetitive operations.

On the CLI, I constantly use the history list, and I constantly write throwaway scripts to automate what I'm doing at the moment. It makes everything I do, no matter how obscure, only 2 or 3 keypresses.

With VS, or any GUI, if there's not a button to do it, I'm reduced to:

move mouse
click
move mouse
click
move mouse
type
move mouse
click
type

to get something done. And if I want to do it again, I have to repeat that process. After the 10th time, it's gaaaaahhh I hate it and go back to the CLI.

I scan a lot of photos. I have a GUI photo editor. A common thing I do is straighten the photos, because they never go through the scanner straight. So it's:

right shift click on the picture
select open with
select photoeditor
select edit
select rotate
select autorotate
select apply
select save
select exit

Sounds easy, right? It is easy. Now do it to 1000 photos. With a command line tool:

write a script that does it to one picture, name it cc.bat

do:
   dir/b *.jpg >doit.bat

open the file and use the macro feature to prepend "cc " to each file name, maybe 10 keystrokes

execute the script

Done! And CLI Clint goes and surfs the n.g. while GUI Gus has just gotten to picture 4, only 996 more to go!