The Command Line - Best Newbie Interface?

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."

Comments

MicroSoft late to GUIs

[peter303]

I find the comment "before MicroSoft" amusing. Apple had the first commercially successful GUI in 1984- nine years before MicroSofts wirst usable version of windows. The UNIX world was using XWindows six years earlier too. Everyone was making fun of MicroSoft's lowly MS-DOS interface well into the 1990s.

info is no picnic either

[CmdrTHAC0]

Fire up 'info bash' sometime and have a look around. They split many things according to whether they're Bourne or Bash shell features. I can see where this information would be useful for someone writing portable sh code, but splitting the contents by it is Just Wrong. It should be done by command. Things seem to be split up among too many indices, as well.

The cvs info page is another horridly designed piece of trash. They may have one index, but you have to use the 'l' command a lot since all the commands (at least) are documented several ways in several places, none of which is ever what you wanted.

Try finding "GCC options" in the GCC info pages. They're stealthily hidden away under "Invoking", like it's some sort of deep black art to run a fscking compiler. It wouldn't be too hard to find with recursive search.

Which brings me to my last point: info's navigation is awful. Why can't there be a sane system for it (like pinfo) with Emacs overriding it for people actually using it in Emacs (who would therefore be expected to know the proper commands)?

I'm pointing this out because a lot of times Linux Oldtimers point people to info, probably without realizing exactly how horrid it is. It is not at all accessible to newbies, and probably should just be chucked in its current form.