Didn’t really call any tool useless, but pointless. As in there are other tools that do things similarly but not the same. But habits are habits and people are not willing to change always, especially if there are a lot of changes to be made, no matter how trivial. Comfort zone is called that for a reason.
Also, not everyone knows how to make something for themself. When I switched full time to Linux we had few options in twin panel file managers which I was use to (Total Commander). None of them worked the way I liked them to. That is to say respected system theme and didn’t take a lot of time to refresh directory. So I wrote my own. But it’s an ongoing endeavor and I have to say an exhausting one.
barsoap@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Just looked at the feature set as it’s been ages and yep, infranview does stuff that gwenview doesn’t. For filters more complex than rotate, add basic text etc. I’d open krita, for batching there’s imagemagick.
This actually goes into philosophy: UNIX follows the “do one thing, and do one thing well” approach. Imagemagick is a better batcher than infranview, krita is a better editor than infranview, gwenview… well, is a better program to throw at random desktop users just wanting to view an image folder and rotate their snapshots precisely because it is not so overladen with features. Infranview is like if you took winamp and added half of a DAW to it.
It really should run under wine, though, things don’t tend to get platinum-rated by accident.
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’d just like to correct you on UNIX following the “do one thing, and do it good” philosophy. UNIX preaches that, but is doing everything else than following it. From cat to grep to cp and dd and many many many other redundant tools that exist in the system. All that said, I would like to point out it’s a completely pointless philosophy which serves no purpose it once had.
In the age of text terminals and when your work was managing phone books and writing documents, that made sense. Today we have far too complex systems to just expect people to work by making a pipe with 5 tools lined up to achieve something a single click in menu can do.
jj4211@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, “duplicate” functionality isn’t counter, but generally it’s not quite “duplicate” either.
cat doesn’t do much, and technically in most cases where people use cat, they can skip the use of cat. cat and grep aren’t at all redundant, but maybe you mean cat |grep , versus “grep file”, but really the first form is not a design intent, it’s that cat is a habit to “get content to screen” and “pipe to grep” is a habit to filter out whatever content was on screen.
cp and dd are not really the same. dd is meant to take specific blocks from one place and put them in a specific place in one other file. cp is about copying whole files only, and can do a bunch of files to one directory.
As to it being ‘obsolete’, well the thing is that UI design has been swinging back to “CLI-y” ways, because you only have so much real estate on screen for guided menu driven action, and a fairly open ended universe of things people want to do. When people use office, they usually just start typing what they want rather than trying to find it by navigating the ribbon.
Though the “one tool and do it well” usually doesn’t happen in GUI land (closest I can think is NextStep had some of it, and vestigial bits of that are possible in macos, though never used), but it’s still plenty valuable.
barsoap@lemm.ee 9 months ago
…redundant with what? Sure, instead of
grepyou can usesed -e g/re/p: First came ed which can do the same but requires the whole file to be loaded into memory so grep was written as a way to search through files ergonomically and quickly. Quite a bit later came sed to do more complex operations on files in a streaming manner: Sed is for streaming editing, ed is for interactive editing, they happen to share a common vocabulary but really are made for different things. grep knows exactly one word from that vocabulary and applies it to multiple files in a single command, something that’s not really suitable for the editors.Can’t think of anything that’s redundant with cp, unless we leave the terminal. dd and cat might have some overlap but only if you combine cat with shell redirection. I’ll freely admit that dd is a hell of a wart, though, it is so damn ancient it predates unix command line option conventions.
No. The way it usually works is that an end-user makes a click and things get handled by five different tools, completely behind the scenes. Power-users then can come along and customise that stuff as they wish.
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s the whole point, you are not suppose to use
grepifsedworks. You are not suppose to usecpifcat file > new.fileworks. That’s the “UNIX way”, which is stupid ascpbrings a lot more features when it comes to files. Back when that “rule” was inventedcatonly printed files on screen or piped them through. Nothing more. Today you can do all kinds of things with it and to be honest am happy that there are multiple tools doing the same thing. Grep is fine for some things RipGrep and SilverSearcher for others. Am not going to handicap myself or wait for 16h forgrepto finish digging inefficiently through files because someone said I had to do things “UNIX way”.It’s time we get rid of old ways and embrace modern computing, up to a point where people started building note taking applications in whole web browsers.
asret@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
The UNIX philosophy isn’t about having only one way to do things - it’s about being able to use tools together. The deliberately simple interface is what makes it so powerful - almost any existing too can become part of a pipeline. It’s adaptable.