Category: Best Designed Interface in a Non-GUI App

Hey! We're Unix junkies, right? That whole mouse thing is just a fad anyway. The CLI is more efficient for a lot of things... and a good ncurses app is gonna run a heckuva lot faster than, say, Netscape. So this is your chance to nominate the non-graphical application you love most. The one with the interface that you wouldn't trade in for all the bloated graphics and icons in the world.

Comments

cdparanoia

[volsung]

Okay, so it's not interactive, but I love the status information it gives me at the console while doing batch jobs. I especially like the use of smiley faces to convey program state.

Vim

[crumley]

Yes, I am risking a vi/emacs flamewar.

And, yes vi has been around forever.

And, yes there are a bunch of other vi clones.

But I use vim everyday, and I would hate to have to use something else. I am addicted to syntax highlighting, keyboard driven commands, and regex driven search and replace.

So call me old fashioned if you want, but I'm nominating vim.

pine

[dangermouse]

pine's interface is great... a bit minimalist, but everything's there in terms of functionality. It could *maybe* be easier to use, but that'd be hard.

Re:pine

[John Fulmer]

Agreed! Nothing beats the grrrrreat scent of PINE!

jf

Re:Agreed. Kudos to pine.

[Kurt Gray]

pine is simple and logical. Going through a pile of email is easy, just tap the N key to see the next message, R to reply, Ctrl+X to send, D to delete (and by the way all these commands are highlighted at the bottom of the screen so you don't have to memorize odd keystrokes)

Pine makes it very easy to do your email over a remote shell session.

My only gripe with pine is how difficult they make it to make your reply-to address different from your username -- it's a hidden option!

pine also includes the pico editor which I nominated as best open source editor.

Emacspeak

[hzo]

Emacspeak is a speech enabled interface
for computer users who are blind.

Written by T.V. Raman who is blind himself,
Emacspeak has opened the door of high performance
computing to many others who would be locked out otherwise.

Even the NSA is using it. So it has to be powerful :)

Emacspeak provides speech enabled web browsing,
spread sheets, speech icons, speech locking
(different kinds of text are spoken with different
voices, similar to text colorisation in Vim),
speech enabled handling of formulas, email, news
and so many more features. Check it out yourself.

Did you ever see a blind person playing Tetris?

I did and this was the final kick that convinced me,
that Emacspeak is the most advanced
non graphical user interface available on this planet.
(It is IMHO even more advanced than many GUIs :)

I therefore nominate Emacspeak for /.'s
Best Designed Interface in a Non-GUI App Award.

Enjoy!
Hans



--

Re:Lynx

[The Light Eternal]

Hurrah! Lynx! The only browser that isn't absolutely frickin' bloated and dumb. :P
".. I like pork!"

Re:Mutt

[QuMa]

Mutt has no text editor! It spawns a text editor for all editing. It definately should not be in the text editor section. (Mind you, it's still the coolest editor).