If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
replies(7):
ffmpeg -i input.avi output.mp41) They have to know how to get to a command line somewhere/how (most of this group of users would be stymied right here and get no further along);
2) They now have to change the current directory of their CLI that they did get open to the location in their filesystem where the video is actually stored (for the tiny sliver who get past #1 above, this will stymie most of them, as they have no idea exactly where on disk their "Downloads" [or other meta-directory item] is actually located);
3) For the very few who actually get to this step, unless they already have ffmpeg installed on their PATH, they will get a command not found error after typing the command, ending their progress unless they now go and install ffmpeg;
4) For the very very few who would make it here, almost all of them will now have to accurately type out every character in "a-really_big_filename with spaces .mov", as they will not know anything about filename completion to let the shell do this for them. And if the filename does have spaces, and many will, they now need to somehow know 4a) that they have to escape the spaces and 4b) how to go about escaping the spaces, or they will instead get some ffmpeg error (hopefully just 'file not found', but with the extra parameters that unescaped spaces will create, it might just be a variant of "unknown option switch" error instead).
Few people are able to see through the eyes of a beginner, when they are a master.
The 4th one is a pain to teach. Every other file and directory has spaces... so I encourage liberal use of the TAB key for beginners.
They can right-click in the folder view of their OS file viewer. On Windows they can also just type the command into the path bar.
When you tell them the command, you could also just install it. Also you could just tell them to type the name of the app 'ffmpeg' into the OS store and press install. They do this on their phone all the time.
One of the things I've noticed is that people trying to help the true beginners vastly overestimate their skill level, and when you get a couple of people all trying to help, each of them is making a completely different set of suggestions which doesn't end up helpful at all. Recently, I was helping somebody who was struggling with trying to compile and link against a C++ library on Windows, and the second person to suggest something went full-bore down the "just install and use a Linux VM cause I don't have time to help you do anything on Windows."
Two decades ago, users understood what "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents" meant and navigated those paths easily. Yet, we decided they were too "stupid" to deal with files and file paths, hiding them away. This conveniently locked users into proprietary platforms. Your point #2 reflects a lie we've collectively accepted as reality. Sadly, too many people now can’t even imagine that a straightforward way to exchange data among different software once existed, but that's a situation we're deliberately perpetuating.
This needs to change. Users deserve the opportunity to learn and engage with their tools rather than being treated as incapable. It’s time we started empowering users for a change.
But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too. What is clicking? What does this X do? What's a desktop again? I don't understand, why do I need 1 million pixels to change an mp3 to an avi? What does that window looking thing in the corner do? Oh no, I pressed the little rectangle at the top right and now it's gone, it disappeared. No not the one with the X, I think it was the other one.
Pretty much all computer use secretly relied on hundreds if not thousands of completely arbitrary decisions and functionality you just have to know. Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.
Heck, even computing education (and the profession even!) has been propped up by GUIs. After my first year in CS, there were like only three to five of us in a section of forty to fifty who could compile Java from the command line, who would dare edit PATH variables. I'm pretty sure that number didn't improve by much when we graduated. A lot of professionals wouldn't touch a CLI either. I'm not saying they are bad programmers but fact of the matter is there are competent professional programmers who pretty much just expect a working machine handed to them by IT and then expect DevOps to fix Jenkins when it's borked out.
Remember: HN isn't all programmers. There are more out there.
> But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too.
We don't even need to assume, we just need to look at history. GUIs came with a huge amount of educational campaigning behind it, be it corporate (i.e., ads/training programs that teach users how to use their products) or even government campaigns (i.e., computer literacy classes, computer curriculum integrated at school). That's of course followed by man-years upon man-years of usability studies and the bigger vendors keeping consistent GUI metaphors across their products.
Before all of this, users did ask the questions that you enumerated and certain demographics still do to this day.
> Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.
"Everything should be made simple, but not simpler." Has it occurred to you that maybe CLI tools assume too little?
And onto your point about CLI tools often making too little assumptions: this is 100% true, and also a superpower. There's a reason that a tool like ffmpeg can spawn 1000 GUI programs from it, each with their own draws. It's a generic tool, not necessarily an application. Many CLI programs are like this.
That can raise the complexity but it's a tradeoff. Many GUIs are too "happy path" centralized, and that happy path is different for different people, so they become cumbersome and unintuitive in too many use cases. A great example would be just about everything Microsoft makes.