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The Command Line - Best Newbie Interface?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-bloody-likely dept.

An anonymous reader writes "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."

3 of 885 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The 'help' command by pandrijeczko · · Score: 5, Informative
    Just do an alias of "help" to "man -k".

    As long as "makewhatis" is setup first, that will do about the same thing.

    --
    Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
  2. Re:The 'help' command by PowerBert · · Score: 5, Informative

    bash has a help builtin which will direct the user to man and info commands.

    $ help foobar
    -bash: help: no help topics match `foobar'. Try `help help' or `man -k foobar' or `info foobar'.

  3. Obligatory IBM Model M link by oneiros27 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Model M is still being made, under a different name, but you can now get them with a 'windows' key, or even in black.
    http://www.pckeyboard.com/customizer.html
    --
    Build it, and they will come^Hplain.