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.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Back before there were GUI's, CLI's (and crude ones at that: my college didn't have ready access to anything as advanced as a Unix machine when I was there) was all we had and it worked. I programmed mostly in DEC Basic (everything else was punched cards.) I played a lot of Zork and its relatives (long after college, of course.)
A GUI doesn't do anything that can't be done otherwise (though my vi is pretty rusty these days), it just does it tremendously faster and easier. I still use a command line for admin type things (the standard renaming thousands of files) but editing hundreds of source files that way just doesn't cut it. It's possible but not practical.
Thinking about it, a CLI feels claustrophobic now: a GUI presents and lets me handle a lot more information at once (and reduces the amount I have to memorize to do it.)
For complete newbies, the CLI makes sense because they have so little to keep track of. Once they start using more than a few % of the features of their new computers, they'll discover that there is a better way to organize things than memorizing commands.