Star The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface?
Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces 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.
E-mail Print r 0   · Read More · 94 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/4ui
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Easy mnemonic "quirkiness"
by de Selby on Tue 9th Mar 2004 14:41 UTC

You might be able to "sound out" some commands like rm, ls or cp to remember what they mean. (I don't know why, but cp aways gave me trouble, though.)

But awk, cat, cron, dd, figer, grep, hash, ln, nice, ps, tac, tee, top, touch, and almost any program/command not clearly named after its function gives people some real trouble (even cups).