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nope, command lines are worse because a) you're gonna hate typing even a measly dozen options and b) you're gonna have to keep switching to the man page just to remember/understand what to type.
It infuriates me how the *nix crowd doesn't understand the whole point of guis. They think it's just about pretty buttons and using the mouse. No, it's a fundamentally better way to present options and features.
It's also DEFINATELY not about mouse-vs-keyboard. (Well, on *nix it might be, but that's because the guis there are programmed so poorly.) A good gui will let you do everything from the keyboard. (E.g., ever notice those underlined letters?) You can use VS.net from the keyboard same as you can vi, but VS will expose 100x the features and the fraction of features you'll actually know how to use will also be far greater.
Of course none of that changes the fact that neither I nor you know how to do a good gui, but at least I don't try to esteem the limitations of my medium. The *nix crowd always does that, and it saddens me that *nix has hardly evolved in 30 years. 30 years!
On the other hand, though, I must say the command-line is very very useful when you're tying together various programs to do something new. Obviously that's the only way pdfrasterfarian was constructued, and I owe much gratitude. But if that's the rightful use of the command-line, then I think no one should have qualms with cramming in hundreds of options and parameters and a long manual that no human should ever have to use directly in the day-to-day.
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And now,
that's one opinion which I won't attempt to address at all. That's start another thread altogether, so I'd really prefer not to move off the topic we're discussing here
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This was an issue of discussion in the backend thread, and it surprised me when you said "no, the backend shouldn't have so many command-line options."
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alex_d,
all I said was that
"I don't want to add too many options unrelated to PDFRead (as the ones related to unpaper would be)". I don't think that's being unreasonable. To put it in context, would you replicate all the options in any GUI in a seperate GUI, then call the earlier GUI with the options filled in the second one? That's what I was objecting to, adding all the
unpaper command-line options (and they are quite a lot) to satisfy maybe < 20% of the users. I have no problems in adding unpaper related functionality, but
not in a way which would make it overly complex for everyone ie. use the principle "Make things as simple as they can be, and no simpler".