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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Maybe what is needed is a GUI-fied CLI?
For example, when you start typing a command and press Ctrl+r for recent commands, it would popup a list of the relevant recent commands in a non intrusive way.
Or say, when you put jobs in the background, and they finish, you could have a little space on top to show you the background processes.
Or tabs as a gui way for the screen command? (Yes this exsists)
And last, when I start to type a command, a non-intrusive panel could popup showing me a little help about the command (such as possible argument variables)
I am sure there are many more such enhancements that could be done to the CLI to make it easier for beginers.