The Modern Command Line Interface
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.
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March 23, 2008 at 12:09 am
[...] spell the name of the company or service. This is a huge shift in user patterns, as users develop command line approaches to searching and finding information. Note also that referral traffic dropped [...]
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September 11, 2009 at 2:50 am
What a great headline.
You know, commandline interfaces were also the “wave” of the past, before there were PC’s or Mac’s. We have a Frenchman to thank for the concept of the command line.
I’d say GUI’s are and will always be nothing but a “ripple”. We have no one to thank for GUI’s. They rob you of power.
The “wave of the future” is people realising the best shells were designed decades ago and distributed for free. The Bourne shell (sh) is and will always be the premier scripting shell. And scripting is where all the power comes from.
Power and user-friendliness are rarely mutually compatible. That’s why “PowerShell” or any other gimmick you encounter will never be as powerful as what was designed decades ago. These gimmicks sacrafice power for “ease of use”- in the interest of getting people to use them. That’s why there are GUI’s. Because few people are interested in computers enough to learn how to use them. If you use these gimmicks you will always be handicapped compared to someone who knows sh.
You don’t have to type long commands. Use aliases. There is so much flexibility in UNIX. Anything is possible. If it doesn’t exist, write it yourself.
I don’t want the computer guessing what I want. The computer is fast, but dumb. I am the boss. I want to tell the computer exactly what I want it to do and then have the computer do it. That’s power.