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.
Autocad, being an inherently gui-based application, in fact has a command line where every single command can be done, complete with history. If I want to create a square, I can merely type the command into the app and poof! I get my square. If I did something wrong, the command line tells me.
To me, if an application is complex enough, adding more menus and more buttons does nothing but confuse more. But if the application has a command line, which you know will allow you to get the full functionality of the application, then nothing seems so daunting anymore.