Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.
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but the interface has to be simple to get most work done.
a nice mix might be the task bar, and rather than the desktop, you have a CLI to type in your commands. when you launch an app, it creates a button on the taskbar and moves on top of the CLI and it is off to pointy-clicky.
the best command line iterface would be one that can identify a subset of natural language so you can ask it to open a certain document, or display a list of documents that meet certain criteria and it will do it.