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?

Comments

Hopeful

[dsginter]

What's ahead for the next five years?

Hopefully, some higher power will pick an OSS desktop, create some interface and application standards and we can all start dumping Windows. Until then, my Linux migration ends at the point where I have to pick gnome or KDE (or even something else).

Which one should I pick and why?

Future ?

[mirko]

There are many ways to predict the future, I personally think the monitors will be everywhere, from our flat's walls to our clothes' sleeves.
It'll still be flat (2D) and people should now realize that what counts is the input.
For years, we only had one focus at a time and this should change, thus allowing drastical changes (imagine if several networkedusers have a focus on an app at the same time... impossible ? who remembers the Acorn "Spheres of chaos" where 4 users could play on the same machine at the same time ?).
So, I'd go for a more practical approach to a 2D interface (I was thinking of some itnerface that would ban both scrollbars and overlapping windows by magnifying the active zone of each focussed elements while reducing the others thus making these still visible, ergo invokable)...

Monad

[Jugalator]

When seeing an article like this going on about command line histories and 3D desktops, it's interesting that a major new feature in Microsoft Longhorn will be the completely new shell code-named Monad. Hm. Better late than never, I guess. I wonder why they see a need for it though; aren't they trying to move away from a command line? Maybe it's an attempt to get back users having switched from Windows. Who knows, but that sounds a bit strange too, since it won't be very compatible with a *nix shell either. :-/

IMHO, it's one of the strangest and most surprising moves in Longhorn.

Real computing

[Himring]

I studied English lit and ancient Greek in college. I gained the best understanding of grammar, syntax and sentence structure from Greek. Breaking down those huge words, looking at a language from scratch -- it has helped me the most in English. It's tough now to not see Greek in English words. I view prepositional purposes from the Greek model and all parts of speech came into light through Greek (queue the "it's all Greek to me" jokes).

When it comes to computing, I started out at the command line. True computing, to me, IS the command line, and I gained the most understanding of computers from it. I prefer to use Linux that way (I don't load a GUI). "Windows is a good terminal" is how I think Richie put it, and although the GUI is here and necessary, real computing will always be from the command line. I will admit Lynx never replaced a GUI web browser for me, but someone who really knows the command line (and therefore the OS) can run circles around the mousey admins....

Re:As long as the keyboard?

[md81544]

The keyboard isn't sacrosanct... granted, we'll always want to be able to enter text (at least those of us belonging to the rebel alliance will).

I can't imagine ever having speech recognition being good enough for a programmer, it would be too slow to have to say "cout less than less than quote capitalised Hello comma world less than less than quote semi colon", and it would make the workplace an awful noisy place :-)

But what about the non-invasive "thinking caps" featured recently in a story? Maybe one day we'll be able to simply "see" the word or line and it will be entered...

Re:As long as the keyboard?

[perkr]

And why would that be the case considering how long time it takes to be proficient in typing? Surely, it is possible that an alternative text entry interface would emerge in the future.

For example Dasher is pretty cool, and there are other (in fact numerous) alternative interfaces. See for example Masui's on-line bibliography.

Command shells could stand improvement

[Junks Jerzey]

I'm a die hard command line user, yes. I have no delusions about it always being better than a GUI--I use both--but I do a significant amount of work from the command line.

What's peculiar to me is how crusty and stale most command line environments have become. Most UNIX users swear by bash, which isn't even as nice as 4NT for Windows. Feels like there's a lot of room for improvement here. For example, how about capturing all of the output per command, then quickly allowing you to scroll through a list of previous commands and jump to its output? Or getting away from overly static command line windows and instead having something like a simple text editor, where you can move around in a "document" and press Enter at any time, with the output always appearing below it (some language interpreters work like this). And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days, so a shell doesn't need to be bulked up with such commands. Just use Perl or Python (or whatever) for that sort of thing.

Note again, I'm not trashing the command line. I'd simply like to see it move forward.