GUI, CLI and UNIX Philosophy

Unix Philosophy advocates combining multiple small programs that do only one thing . What are the benefits ？

Independent high cohesion programs can be coupled into more possibilities , Only through input and output coupling is the lowest coupling , This is Unix/Linux The foundation of Philosophy .

Whether it's GUI Or multi parameter CLI, It is not convenient for multi program cooperation .UI It's for people, not for programs .

You might as well compare GUI And multiple parameters CLI.

GUI The operation interface is a two-dimensional screen control , It's easy for the human eye to recognize controls , And know the purpose of the control , For example, one that says “ determine ” perhaps “ Cancel ” The button , perhaps “ View ” Under the menu “ Zoom in ”.

If you want to GUI Programs work together , Then the program should not only understand the control description and find its location , Also understand the classification of controls , Whether it's a button , Or the menu , all GUI Controls must be positioned in both dimensions , It is impossible for the program to understand this positioning . It's hard even for people , I just finished an article for my daughter Word draft , It's hard to find out how to adjust the margins . Hard to return , But as long as it takes time , You can always “ find ” Control , Because self describing GUI Control “ Somewhere ”.

The problem of control positioning is CLI It's much better ,CLI The command line is just one line , One line is one dimension , One dimensional command lines do not need to be positioned ,append Add parameters , But the parameters and their functions must be known in advance , If you don't know the meaning of the parameter in advance , You can never “ find ” it ,CLI Parameters are not self describing , In you append Before it , It's not anywhere . This means that for CLI,help or manual It's very important , No, help or manual,CLI Can't use .

GUI Since the description , Locate the control to be operated by finding it on the two-dimensional screen . Unskilled people can also find controls and operate them through self description , Skilled people still can't save two-dimensional positioning operation , The batch , Shortcut keys can't go anywhere .

CLI Non self description , One dimensional command lines do not need to be positioned ,append Parameters can be . The first use must check help or manual, Otherwise it won't work , Once proficient, you can script , comparison GUI The operation will be very fast .

That's all GUI and CLI Differences in . But no matter GUI still CLI, It's hard to expect programs to understand each other . about GUI, Tricks like mouse sprites have never been popular , And for CLI, Write a program to receive all the output of another program and understand its different meanings , Will make things extremely complicated .

The only thing that allows programs to collaborate in an easy way is to keep each program's separate input and output .
such as ：

cat /opt/abc |grep '\<[0-9][0-9][0-9]\>'|uniq|sort 

although iptables It's easy to stop a malicious IP Data packets of , But the premise is that someone needs to type out the whole order , It's hard to have a program that can output IP Address , Protocol port, etc match, The program outputs these parameters separately , It's hard to connect between procedures , There is only one root cause ,iptables Multiple parameters with meanings are required .

Human beings are intelligent , It's very inefficient to do things in a binary combination , People can recognize with their eyes GUI Control and manipulate it , People can also understand CLI Parameters and append it , But the program doesn't work , The program cannot find GUI Control and understand it , I can't understand CLI Parameters . If there are only programs in the world , Then the stupidest and most reasonable program can only converge to do one thing , Carry a clear input and output to do it , It becomes the of this program “ nucleus ”, This is it. Unix philosophy ,Unix Born for collaboration between programs .

Thought again GUI and CLI, I think it's interesting , I can't sleep , Write a composition .

Zhejiang Wenzhou leather shoes wet , It's not fat when it's raining .