this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There's a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.
I used to think something like this when I was younger. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for good gui versions of cli tools. I have come to understand that this is not usually the case and cli tools are more convenient much of the time. I would not classify this as superiority complex, unless I’m being a jerk about it. I don’t care what you use, I just use whatever has the lowest barrier to entry with the most standardization, which is usually the original cli tool.
That said, jetbrains git integration is awesome.
It also depends on the specifics — in many cases when a GUI is just a wrapper over the CLI tool, it is instructive to learn the CLI, similarly how you are a better programmer if you know about at least a layer beneath the one you are programming at (e.g. you can reason about this usage of hashmap because you roughly know what it does).
It is probably the most visible in git, but if you can only do commit and push from a GUI, just please learn the CLI as well. You don’t have to use it, but understanding it is important and the GUI may abstract away too much from you.
I agree only when your job function is specifically geared around those tools... Otherwise high quality guis are more valuable.
Just because I can do everything in gdb that I can do in visual studio doesn't mean 99% of most debugging tasks isn't easier and faster in visual studio. Now if my job was specifically aimed at debugging/reverse engineering there are certain things that gdb does better on the CLI... But for most software devs... CLI gdb isn't valuable.