So some days ago I made a really simple, somewhat low effort "Hey CLI is nice here's a quick overview to make it not suck" post and it got like NO interaction. That's very fair, I think most of the people that follow me either don't care about + tolerate my ramblings on computer crap (thanks yall) or are more well versed than I am, so something like that wouldn't be of much interest to either group.
Today I ended up reading some posts+comments about people talking about how unpleasant CLI (and ffmpeg) are to use. Now let me be clear, this is not to accuse people of being wrong to be upset at something they find difficult to use. What this post is about is my own perspective on things.
The two things here I would like to know about. First, do people really dislike using CLI that much? It's difficult to separate this from my own experiences, which were "It sucked until I actually learned how it worked". I also put a LOT of the blame of this down to using windows' CMD/DOS at the time, which was very unpleasant. Do people really take issue with even modern 'nix CLI that much? Is it harder to learn that I'm assuming it is for others?
With ffmpeg I'm sure my perspective has to be skewed on this. I've been learning about video and audio encoding stuff in some form or another for the majority of my life and I've always found it at least somewhat interesting. One had to know the basics of audio codecs to get invited to What back in the day and that's when I learned that, later on when a particular shitty website got webm support I found myself enjoying learning how video encoding worked for that as well. I literally enjoy messing with ffmpeg in my spare time, I find it fun. This is obviously an outlier, but does the average cohost user not really know or care much about stuff like video codecs and bitrates and such? Is this the kind of thing that makes people's brains shut off, and I should treat it with that in mind?
Again, I'm trying as strongly as possible not to make this accusatory. Learning esoteric tech shit is very optional and one should only do it when they find it fun and interesting, or are being paid the Big Bucks. I don't want to force anyone to learn anything they don't have interest in or say they should. I just want to make sure I have an accurate perspective on how the typical somewhat-familiar-with-tech-crap person sees this.
yes I've seen "Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast" and I was upset that huge command was not a real command and I've heavily considered making a real one that long.