Command Line and User Friendliness • Hacker News Board

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#11

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:03 AM UTC

marknadal wrote: post #2

But you are missing something... Try photo manipulation with a CLI. Art requires spatial interaction, not merely "conversational" expressions.

[deleted]

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#12

Post by kevinconroy » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:04 AM UTC

muyyatin wrote: post #4

Typing in a particular phrase in the Google search box won't delete all of your mail and files, so you could think of it as a "safer" or "immutable" shell. CLI in contrast can modify things, not just give you back information.

In some sense, the omnibar in Chrome is the CLI interface for Google. It both manipulates your browser and does searches. Probably wouldn't take much for Google to expand on this and add commands to help you send emails, interact on G+, and more.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#13

Post by kevinconroy » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:05 AM UTC

Agree that CLI are powerful but also scary to novice users.

So who's going to make cliacademy.com to ensure that everyone learns how to use a CLI?

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#14

Post by ori_b » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:08 AM UTC

The biggest difference between, bash and, for example, Google, Quicksilver, etc, is the level of fuzziness that they will accept. With Google, you can enter damn near anything you want, and it will accept it and try to do something sensible. With the shell, you get cryptic errors if you have a small typo.

    ls foo(bar)

doesn't list files that look like foo(bar), it says "bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('". It has no method of easily discovering that 'ls' means 'list files'. And typos can potentially harm data.

None of this means that the command line is useless or a bad idea, but it does make it relatively unfriendly towards newbies. Even if the concept is more intuitive, the current incarnation can be scary.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#15

Post by lukeschlather » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:18 AM UTC

marknadal wrote: post #2

But you are missing something... Try photo manipulation with a CLI. Art requires spatial interaction, not merely "conversational" expressions.

There have been quite a few times I've gotten hopelessly frustrated trying to do simple photo manipulation tasks with GUI software and just jumped back to ImageMagick.

There's a lot to be said for the quiet simplicity of `convert -scale 25% foo.jpg smallfoo.jpg`.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#16

Post by h84ru3a » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:22 AM UTC

TOPS-20

Autocomplete.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#17

Post by grannyg00se » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:24 AM UTC

"You type something in, and the machine either executes your command, or goes “I have no clue what you just said, did you by any chance mean XYZ?”"

What sort of wizardry is this? My shell (BASH) does not say "did you by any chance mean XYZ?" It stops after saying "I have no clue what you just said" and then stares at me like I'm an idiot.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#18

Post by underwater » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:25 AM UTC

The command line may be efficient, but it is far from intuitive.

I work with command line tools every day, and I am still constantly searching Google and man pages whenever I need to do something outside of my normal flow.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#19

Post by underwater » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #8

Scene_Cast wrote: post #3

I am one of those people who thing that CLIs are not user friendly. The premise - giving a computer instructions via Natural Language (NL) - is very sound. However, the way CLI is done right now (from the ground up) - is broken. The most obvious example - why are CLIs ASCII-based? I want to pass around objects - "ls" should only give me just that, an array of objects (which can be serialized for output in any graphic…

I have no idea what you mean by "passing around objects", and I guess that wouldn't make it any more friendly. An "object" is an abstract concept that must be known beforehand, and is just one in a myriad that could exist in the context of interacting with a computer. Have you heard of TermKit? It was an experiment in intertwining graphical and command-line interfaces: https://github.com/unconed/TermKit/

If I want to work with e output of ls, why do I need to manually parse fragile strings?

It would be neat to have basic stringable primatives, like maps and tables, that scripts could write and read.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#20

Post by christianmann » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

grannyg00se wrote: post #17

"You type something in, and the machine either executes your command, or goes “I have no clue what you just said, did you by any chance mean XYZ?”" What sort of wizardry is this? My shell (BASH) does not say "did you by any chance mean XYZ?" It stops after saying "I have no clue what you just said" and then stares at me like I'm an idiot.

Have you considered zsh? Much better autocomplete options available (and enabled by default).