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
A CLI might indeed be better than a GUI for file management... but how about the applications? Mail, Pine, Mutt, TRN, Links, VI and Emacs all work in a different way. That is also confusing. For example, I know how to compile a Linux kernel, made a Windows webserver with plugin support with Delphi, I have no problems in using Windows, MacOS, KDE or GNOME, not using Pine or Nano. But Emacs or Vi are just too confusing to me.
So how should applications be fitted into a sheme? Should they also be cli? I guess not, as that would effectively multiply the number of commands. I would still think that, to be user-friendly, you need a consistent interface, thus with all applications supporting either EXIT or QUIT, "mail" also supporting the CD command to enter mail folders, and so on. And of course, widgets (such as for text editing) should always behave the same.