User:Woozle/CLI and my brain

I've been wanting to write an article about how CLI poses an accessibility problem for a lot of people, myself included, and why GUI works so much better for us even if it is more difficult to code for and in some ways less powerful. This comes up a lot because many coders -- especially open-source coders, for some reason -- don't seem to understand how GUI works (or should work) or why it's even necessary.

I'm taking notes on when I bump into issues that make CLI functions harder to use for me than their corresponding GUI implementation, and maybe also when I bump into badly-designed GUI features.

A metaphor: when the GUI version of some function is poorly-designed, suggesting I just use CLI instead of GUI is a bit like suggesting that when the computer isn't doing what you need, you should just use pencil and paper instead.

Searching APT

screenshot of Synaptic, showing the search box

In Synaptic (a GUI front end for the apt package manager), you just type what you want to look for in the box, wait half a second, and the results appear in the scrollable window below it. They can be sorted by package name with a single click, and clicking on any of the packages shown will give you more information (albeit not always useful). Sometimes applications will have a screenshot or a homepage available, and you can get to those with a single click each. (Caveat: This doesn't always work very well, and the UI doesn't give any indication of whether either one is actually available. I suspect if the developers used Synaptic more, however, both of those issues would soon be addressed.)

On the command line, however, you have to type apt-cache search followed by the search string. This is simple enough, but I have trouble remembering it -- and I think the reasons are:

• I'm expecting it to be a function of apt, not a separate command (apt-cache).
• When I remember that it's a separate command, I expect it to be apt-search or maybe apt-index.
• When I try to find out how to search apt from the command line and see suggestions to use apt-cache, I think that can't be what I'm looking for because I want to search the actual apt database, not a local cache which might be empty or incomplete.
  • Apparently the "cache" is actually more like a mirror, in that it's a frequently-updated local copy of the apt index -- but I still don't know if using apt-cache would cause it to be refreshed if it were empty or incomplete.
• Even if I remember that it's apt-cache, I'm expecting the "search" subcommand to be invoked with a dash option, like most other search functions are -- maybe -s (for "search") or -k (the option to search manpages). -s is an option for apt, but it means something completely different.

{{#useliquidthreads:1}}