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In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated
Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?
It doesn't look too bad either ;-) My only complaint is with the file manager, so I use Xfe/Xwc instead. It comes in Fedora Core 3 if you don't already have a Linux distro installed.
NAK. In the beginning there was the Difference Engine, with all it's cogs and sprockets. Then there came the first electronic machines, filling whole basketball courts, maintained by undergrads with shopping carts full of replacement vacuum tubes and programmed by lengths of wire pushed into sets of holes in a punch block. Punch-card machines were ripped-off from the Census bureau and hooked up to the computers so the scientists could get rid of the damned punch blocks. Command-line came about when someone thought up the idea of hooking-up an old Teletype machine to the cantankerous computers.
Regards;
Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 words per minute, compared with typical ten-finger keyboard typing of 40-60 words per minute.
Experienced dasher users can peak at 34 wpm.. experienced typists can often peak at more than twice that on a qwerty (not to mention a Dvorak layout). And imagine using Dasher for coding - Dasher works well for writing words, but fails totally with the symbols and syntax used in programming.
Some users might be able to work without a keyboard, but I can't see a future where nobody will want a keyboard...
You couldn't say them?
I've tried. You just can't get the same degree of bandwidth and precision of expression from speaking as you can get typing individual characters at a keyboard. Especially if you're trying to code something.
for %a in (image*.jpg) do (
/? screens needed, either.
echo Processing %a...
move %a %date%-%a-image.jpg
)
Works under cmd.exe (Win2000 and XP) - no
Apart of that: cmd.exe features a history (up/down arrow), filename completion (tab key) and history searching (F8).
> On the other hand, show me an
> explorer.exe/KDE/whatever way to say "change all
> the filenames in this dir to lowercase". Or even
> "rename all these files from *.foo to *.bar".
Krename? http://www.krename.net/Screenshots.11.0.html
For the KDE part that is..
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
Honestly, if you have a windows server, after you configure it, why do you need it to run the GUI? but you can't turn it off... and remote sessions like telnet or ssh suck in Windows.
Mac OS apparently has the same problem, but I think it shouldn't be hard to get rid of the GUI for a server. You can boot OS without GUI if you press S while booting, and although it leaves you in single-user mode, if you make a script to start all the netinfo services and additional stuff, you get a working server without the GUI.
Go hug some trees.
The thing which made it look half-baked (rushed) was the (relatively) last-second decision to drop the old shell and put the Workplace Shell on top instead. OS/2 2.0 with the old Program Manager shell was pretty darn solid and could have actually been released six months earlier. Should have been, in my hindsight opinion.