Command line interfaces are the wave of the future.

Aza Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want rather than requiring a structured syntax.

Still, I find myself typing all the time rather than using the mouse. When I starting using a Mac recently, I left Spotlight alone, up in the corner of the screen. Then, I needed something that wasn’t in my dock and it seemed like too much trouble to root around on the hard drive looking for the application, so I figured I’d give searching a try. Success.

At this point, I think it’s faster to just type the name of what I want rather than trying to recognize an icon in the dock. It wasn’t too much longer before I started to search for documents I was working on rather than finding the right application, opening it up, and then opening up the document.

The dealmaker here is the way Spotlight, Quicksilver, Vista’s new start menu, Google Suggest, etc. take your input character by character and start making suggestions about what you might mean. Old school command line interfaces relied upon the user committing things to memory (or paper taped up on the monitor). Old school command line interfaces wanted users to type in the whole command. I want to just type in the fragment of the document’s name that I remember and let the computer do the work of figuring out what I mean.