Sunday, March 31, 2013

Unix Phiolosophy: "do one thing, and do it well" Comes to GUI World Now

Unix command line is still widely used. Everyday, it sees new users who appreciate it. You don't see a lot of duplicated effort in command line tools.
There's only one 'cd', 'cp', 'chmod' etc..
Then these commands are designed to work together by using standard input/output, redirections, piping, scripting etc. They all work like one family. The output of one is taken as the input of the other and they can be chained in a single line like awesome players.
find . -name 'filename' | xargs -r ls -tc | head -n1

But, each GUI application tries to redo what others have already done. A word processor tries to do image editing, an image editor tries to do word processing, etc...
This leads to a lot of duplicate effort, and wasted energy. We don't see the culture of one program doing only one thing and doing it well. Even if they do so, their is no specification how they work together and how one can achieve something bigger by putting them together.

It seems the answer is near. It is Plasmate in KDE.

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