Linked by Greg Afinogenov on Wed 3rd Sep 2003 07:19 UTC
It is not fashionable nowadays to speak of the merits of the command line, in an age where things like streaming video and Aqua are an integral part of our daily life. However, I do not think that typed-in commands must necessarily be consigned to the dustbin of computer history. Of course, I am not suggesting that we all drop X and Windows and pretend like we are living in the early eighties. The command line interface still has much to offer us, and many of its benefits simply cannot physically be emulated or even replaced by graphical ones.
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Of course there is still a place for the CLI - it often provides fadster access to tools than the GUI. On the other hand, I don't think that comments about poorly designed GUIs are really an argument for CLIs - they are an argument for better GUIs.
For example,
>The CLI is far from dead. It's even USEFUL BECAUSE NORMAL ?
>USERS DON'T UNDERSTAND IT, so they will not touch tools
>only meant for sysadmins.
Surely, a better way to make sure "normal" user don't touch the admin tools it to provide a mechanism for the sysadmin to lock users out of these tools (whether GUI or CLI), rather than relying on user ignorance.
>CLI is still useful in windows.. for changing the
>extension if you don't want to have them visible all the
>time.
...or provide a decent way of changing extensions wihin the GUI. Or better still, do away with these extensions *altogether* in GUI mode, and provide a better way of managing a file's type. The close coupling between a file's name and its type is actually counter intuitive. I have often seen users chane a file's extension assuming that its type would "magically" change as well. Personally, I think that a file's name and type should be treated as separate items of metadata about a file, in the same way as a file's name has nothing to do with its size or modification date.
Finally, wouldn't it be great if more tools operated in both GUI and CLI modes, where the same executable could be invoked in both modes?
Regards,
Kram II