Programmer Humor

If you're using a GUI, that means whatever you're doing you're not doing a lot of it, since you don't need to automate it. I would expect a world-class enterprise engineer to be able to automate most tasks, and from that they would be very comfortable with the command line.

Can you do everything with a GUI that you can on a command line? Yeah probably, if the developer is at all the features properly. Can you automate it easily? No not at all. So the more you do something the more you tend to want to deal with the vocabulary of the command line because it's more expressive and allows for automation.

I will die on this hill!

Honestly, some things can be done faster/as fast on GUI. So really just use whatever increases your productivity.

Pshaw! CLI and GUI? Real network engineers make hand crafted API calls!

You gotta admit, it's fun to meme the opposite camp. Whether you are a GUI or CLI person.

To get annoyingly serious on a funny post, the one huge danger of GUIs that I've personally witnessed in many of my juniors is that they abstract away the need to understand the tool you're using.

I regularly use a Git GUI, and I might have to google the rebase command for more complex tasks, but I know how Git works. I know what I can do with rebase, even if I don't exactly know how to. If you only live in the GUI, you can get far never understanding the system. Until one day, when you fuck up a commit or a push, and you're totally hosed because there isn't a pretty button with the exact feature you want in your GUI.

So... my only requirement for my tools is that they have a well-supported CLI, and can be installed headless without graphical dependencies. Tools must be scriptable.

That said, it's nice to have a UI. My ideal configuration is a scriptable tool with a good API, and a separate GUI tool that can drive it.

"graphical user interfaces make easy tasks easy, while command line interfaces make difficult tasks possible"

• William E. Shotts Jr., The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction

It has taken me a long time to get comfortable using a Linux CLI (definitely not as familiar with windows cmd prompt/powershell), and I know that if I log into a box anywhere, If it has sh or bash or some variant of those shells, I'll be able to get by.

Now, on my home server, moving & renaming a bunch of media files has me really wishing I had a DE installed there to Ctrl + click/Drag-n-drop...

Also, I love using VScodium/Code as an IDE bc of its configurability & rich plugin ecosystem -- but recently I had some performance hiccups with extensions not playing nice together and started (again) down the masochistic path of configuring neovim to use as an "IDE"...

Yeah, keep telling yourself that buddy.

Using the right tool for the right task is a big part of being a good engineer.

I think I really only use GUIs if I am learning something new and trying to understand the process/concepts or if I'm doing something I know is too small to automate. Generally once I understand a problem/tool at a deeper level, GUIs start to feel restrictive.

Notable exceptions are mostly focused around observability (Grafana, new relic, DataDog, etc) or just in github. I've used gh-dash before but the web ui is just more practical for day to day use.

For context, I'm in SRE. I feel like +90% of my day is spent in kubernetes, terraform, or ci/cd pipelines. My coworkers tend to use Lens but I'm almost exclusively in kubectl or the occasional k9s.

Someone told me that windows server UI interface has more options than CLI. I got scared of windows server (how do you repeatedly Setup the same server, with a screenshot documentation ???)

PSA: Since his finger and the reflection touches, he's likely looking into a one way mirror. There's someone behind the glass.

Both interfaces are important and useful. I spend much time in both and would hate being force to use either for everything.

it makes you a Windows engineer which is worse

Hard disagree. I use arch btw

Well, there technically are communities for enterprise engineering.... they just, aren't very active.

i feel you bro. people in here talking shit like they don’t know that some net devices are literally made for webgui first and foremost, and programmatic changes don’t work for every api even if it says it’s supported (fucking looking at brocade).

if you’re used to cisco cli, shit like juniper or palo alto or f5 can be intimidating when looking at the configs.

but i swear to fucking god if you use gui instead of cli for cisco, we gon have words.

The keyboard. How quaint.

Use a computer in whatever way you want and/or need to best get the job done. It's a tool for accomplishing tasks. The amount of random gatekeeping for no goddamn reason in tech/programming/FLOSS is ridiculous.

See: Cisco. At least when I last used it, the web server configuration utility added a lot of garbage to your running config that made it unreadable if you swapped back to the cli.

Systems that built the GUI first aren't too bad. Palo Alto UI is pretty decent.

It's a different interface for the same thing. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the job. You should definitely try the CLI if you're into programming or administration

I often prefer GUI/TUI, but I always like a good CLI. It makes automating things so much easier

CLIs are much more comfortable to use.