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20 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
# Graphical User Interface
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Graphical user interface (GUI) is a visual [user interface](ui.md) that uses images; basically this includes icons, colors, shapes, mouse cursor, windows, buttons, pictures etc. This stands in contrast with [text user interface](tui.md) (TUI) which is also visual but only uses text for communication.
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Expert computer users normally frown upon GUI because it is the "noobish", inefficient, limiting, hard to automate way of interacting with computer. GUI brings [complexity](complexity.md) and [bloat](bloat.md), they are slow, inefficient and distracting. We try no to use them and prefer the [command line](cli.md).
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GUIs mostly use [callback](callback.md)-based programming, which again is more complicated than standard polling non-interactive I/O.
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## How and When to Do GUI
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GUI is not forbidden, it has its place, but today it's way too overused -- it should be used only if completely necessary (e.g. in a painting program) or as a completely optional thing build upon a more [suckless](suckless.md) text interface or [API](api.md). So remember: first create a program working without GUI and only then consider creating an optional GUI [frontend](frontend.md).
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Still, when making a GUI, you can make it [suckless](suckless.md) and lighthweight. Do your buttons need to have reflections, soft shadows and rounded anti-aliased borders? No. Do your windows need to be transparent with light-refraction simulation? No. Do you need to introduce many MB of dependencies and pain such as [QT](qt.md)? No.
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The ergonomics and aesthetic design of GUIs has its own field and can't be covered here, but just keep in mind some basic things:
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- Don't have too many elements (buttons etc.) at the screen at once, it's confusing as hell and drives noobs away.
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- Things must be intuitive, i.e. behave in a way that they normally do (e.g. main menu should be at the top of the window, not the bottom etc.).
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- Just use your brain. If a button is important and often used, it should probably be bigger than a button that's used almost never, etc.
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