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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The best feature of the CLI is that you can jump between very different commands very quickly.
Try some more recent ones with bigger parsers. I don't remember any text adventures with a big manual either, the infocom freebies were more in the spirit of fun than documentation.
For instance, to change my IP address, see the uptime and then back up my home directory I can...
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.30
uptime
cp -R ~/important_files/* /home/backup
With a gui I would be hunting through menus, clicking 'ok' boxes and dragging things around. I just don't get the same feeling of agility and economy of thought when mousing about a screen.
For a gui equivelent to the CLI, you would have to have 30 (or however many letters are needed) windows on screen, each with 30 subwindows, and each one of them with 30 more, and so on.
The problem with the CLI (under Linux anyway, I don't really know about other OS's) is that the command's flags are inconsistent, so you can never be sure what a -r,-R etc will do with any command. My ideal would be a UI that combined the best of both CLI/GUI worlds. Ratpoison is a little like this, but I would *never* recommend it to a newbie.
RE: DOOM?
"Very unintuitive, requiring a big manual and a lot of failed guess-work. I think there's an analogy somewhere here..."
Text adventures have moved on a long way since those days.
RE: RE: but...
">music 'pages' or with audio processing, a visual >representation of a synth (input/output/connectors).
well, i rather use a real synth with real knobs than hit virtual ones one at a time with mouse.."
And some of us like using Csound with the CLI too.