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Has the Command Line Outstayed Its Welcome?
dgharmon writes "The Command Line Interface has its uses, acknowledged Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim, but no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI, he says. Keep it as an option or you can take it out all together. 'If it is there, it should just be there for the IT people or tech support to use when you encounter a problem.'"
I invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines here.
No.
Okay, it's a race, you sit there on that Windows 7 box with MP3s scattered all over the drive, round them up with your mouse and move them to this USB stick.
/s
I'll do the same thing with CMD.exe.
xcopy c:\*.mp3 g:\
del c:\*.mp3
I win!
"Yes I have. I have a mother and she's a pain even when you're standing next to her. You pick it up fairly quickly.
The key is to help guide the eyes and always confirm that the expected outcome has happened. It's not a case of saying "Double click network and then click status" It's a case of "Do you see the little icon that looks like ...., now double click it, did you see the window pop-up?, good now at the top of the window there will be a few tabs one of which will say status, now click that status tab..."
It's simple once you adapt to it. Mind you the commandline is not without its problems either. There's a lot of users out there who don't know what the "-" symbol is. Is it a dash, is it minus? Not to mention the many people who don't know which slash is a forward slash and which one is the backslash.
Maybe CLI should not be required. But CLI should always be available.
I can understand a newbie getting scared of big black empty screen. But the newbie can overcome the fear, learn and use that skillfully.
On the other hand, I will never overcome anguish and frustration of repeatedly clicking through the same "Add User" wizard of BackOffice (Small Business Edition) mandated for schools, as I was trying to add four classes of students, each requiring manually entering the same data over and over, roughly 3 minutes per user. Done with cli+adduser command or config file+text editor this would take up to 10 seconds per user. And after a hour of searching for options to automate the process, I arrived at a page where I learned "Batch user addition is not available in Small Business Edition. You need Enterprise edition for this option to work."
But the GUI was so much more intuitive!
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Linux is great for systems that will be managed by folks who do Linux, and its great when those folks can set up a locked down system for someone else. But as an every day replacement for Windows, to be managed and run by average Joe? Yea, not quite yet.
Not even Windows can be adequately managed by Joe and Jane Average. You need a minimal level of understanding in order to keep any system running - not even talking about keeping it safe. I even get silly questions from the Mac users...