[ale] What happened to the command line

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 04:01 -0500, George Allen wrote:
> As an aside I never hear ncurses get any love - but for a clean fast
> interface it tends to be more useful to me than the equivalent GUI
> programs. I usu. have a yukake open with shells, midnight commander,
> sometimes mp3blaster or cymbaline... and always aptitude or apt-get
> for pkg mgt. Tried synaptic or that other one and hated it. As I
> remember all of slackware's old curses dialogs were as simple and
> clean as an interface can get.

Indeed.  My biggest pet peeve with GUI tools is that they often only
give you a subset of the overall functionality that you need, too.  They
can be very useful --- I use lots of them, myself --- but nothing beats,
in my opinion, the command line on any sufficiently powerful operating
system.

That having been said, there are many things that simply are made easier
by GUI utilities.  Update Manager makes it very easy to keep up with the
updates on a system, particularly when you're running a system that is
the development version (like Hardy, which I am currently running), or
instant messaging, or working with large collections of files and the
like.  I use a pretty interesting combination of command-line and GUI
based tools myself, pretty much daily.

What I don't get is why GUIs haven't become more powerful than they
already are.  Certainly, there is an upper bound to the amount of
complexity that they can handle, and maybe its time to start looking for
a different primary interface to computer systems.  There is, of course,
a major question of what a "more natural" interface for computing might
be like.  Maybe it's voice command or something similar to that.  But at
the end of the day, I don't think that there is anything that can beat
the keyboard and a good 'ol UNIX shell with UNIX utilities.  Everything
else is just abstraction.  :)

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/

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