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skydhashtoday at 4:05 PM1 replyview on HN

That's the kind of stuff where you would write a few lines of shell script or perl and not bother with the whole GTK stuff. Because GTK would be accidental complexity to the task (unless you used something like zenity).

This is one of the reasons I like the OpenBSD and suckless projects. There are solutions that are technically correct, but are overengineered.


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stelonixtoday at 4:37 PM

Well I would never write shell because I loathe it's grammar/syntax. I enjoy GUIs and am a heavy mouse user, so the GTK part isn't really an "accidental complexity" but a must have for me. If a LLM can one-shot all the GTK boilerplate it's a win.

That's (as shown in my sample prompt) one great thing I've been using LLMs for: making GUIs for arcane Linux-based OS/userland settings that I have no interest in doing "sudo gedit yadda yadda" or learning man pages for. It's been 30+ years, we deserve a better desktop experience.

I've used suckless packages in the past, but it feels to me too close the GNOME/Apple way of giving zero settings and having opinionated defaults whose opinions do not ring well for me. I have zero desire to change my shortcuts/hotkeys to something random devs chose based on their past computer experience, mostly unix-based. Muscle memory > *.

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